Making legal overbearing legal claims that you probably can't win on but the target can't afford to fight is classic bullying. The idea that this is unintentional is nonsense. It's trying to use the trademark to clawback control of a project that they nominally release to open source.

I'm not seeing anything to support that in the link you posted. And I'm not sure that Aurora *is* derived from PostGres, so the latter version probably isn't accurate.

One thing that comes to my mind is that ownership of the marks is probably less valuable than he thinks they are. The open source community can turn on a dime and rally behind a new brand. It's happened before. Ownership of the plugin repository is the bigger deal IMHO.

Is the pattern that they are all to craven to actually do something about it instead of whining?

1 is too many and yet...

Automattic's position goes way beyond the PostGres policy you linked to. In particular they strongly imply that using the trademark on products *derived* from PostGres is acceptable.

Here's the thing. If I fix a some bugs in Wordpress under GPL I'm *required* to redistribute my changes. But Automattic's position appears to be that I *can't* without their approval. Unless I go to the trouble to scrub the trademarks from the APP. Which is a heavy lift. That's isn't FOSS.

The one lodestar in these people's existence is that they are the protagonist of the story and everything they do is righteous because they decided to do it. Once you accept that their behavior starts making a lot more sense.

Just throw them out. It's clear you don't need them.

Also San Bernardino which is the one that surprised me.