If you look at that repo, what they are doing is totally unambiguous. The README literally acknowledges that they are using Wordpress code, describing the contents of the repository as a "React Native Wrapper for WordPress Rich Text Editor."
They applied the MIT license to their wrapper, which is using the GPL-licensed Wordpress code, and then they embed the whole thing in their proprietary app. They are now compelled to publish the source code of their entire application if they want to comply with the requirements of the GPL.
He mentioned that you can look and see on GitHub that Wix explicitly forked Wordpress repositories.
The gist I got was this - Wordpress was working on this in open source. Wix took their work, built on it, and didn't make their contributions open source, taking advantage of the repository and giving nothing back.
>Wix took their work, built on it, and didn't make their contributions open source, taking advantage of the repository and giving nothing back.
Which is fine if the code was BSD licensed, but the article states that Wordpress uses GPL, hence Wix may be violating the license regardless of the breach in attribution etiquette.
Although it seems against the spirit of GPL, the GPL doesn't explicitly protect against code hosted as a service, so the wix website isn't in violation. That's why AGPL exists.
IANAL, but their private fork (I couldn't find a public one on Github) is also technically permissible, as it's not a redistribution of the code.
Edit: if what's in question are strictly web assets (images, js, etc), then I'm pretty sure, but not certain, this is a violation
But the app is? If they release a modified version of a GPL Android app, they would need to supply the source code, no? The Wix app would constitute a derived work.
Correct, unless WordPress goes AGPL then Wix can keep their hosted code to themselves. However, the Android App which they should of made themselves will need to be open sourced or taken down and open sourced. The GPL if I remember correctly makes it so upon request (thinking of BMW) you must be able to provide access to the source code, even if you sell the product, that means that whoever buys a GPL'd product from you must also receive the code, but if they didn't buy your product there should be no reason for them to have it if I'm not mistaken. The GPL is interesting, and while not my first choice, it's definitely not a terrible choice.
GPL is absolutely useless for commercial products, imo. Unless you can run it encapsulated on some sort of web service as a standalone executable. If the goal is to have more open source code, and more code sharing across systems and services then more code should actually be BSD licensed.
I don't think it's completely useless. If you have software you invested a lot of money into and the company goes out of business and you have your own internal engineers (maybe you didn't want to go this route beforehand because said product was good enough) now you can carry on without the main company. In the case of WordPress unless they disappear somehow, that is when a fork will come. Look at LibreOffice vs OpenOffice. MariaDB is a great example of someone selling a product they made for a LOT of money, and then continuing on with it, now that Oracle has taken MySQL some have taken to using MariaDB instead. Don't knock the GPL, it makes many things possible.
I totally agree on that, _BUT_ I can't use it in a commercial product without releasing my entire commercial source code? The GPL prohibits many commercial applications, and even if I would want to use in something, I often cannot, because it's not feasible to release my entire codebase. There's a lot of GPL software that's just off limits, exactly because of that. In a way, it contaminates commercial codebases. That makes me sad, because a lot of GPL code is of top notch quality.
Why not opt for a BSD license? The things you wrote also apply to BSD licensed open-source software.
If you're releasing your code, it's only to the customer. The one's who receive the code are only the ones who receive the binaries and ONLY upon request, think BMW's code they released upon a customers request. Sometimes it's better to use GPL or BSD, because some customers will not use your product if there is no code to guarantee if your company disappears they can't move on without you. Look at WordPress, their code's right there, and yet nobody can overshadow them yet.
Edit:
I agree with you, but I was mentioning GPL because you placed it in question. BSD is great, MS-PL is a little nicer if you need to protect any patents too.
I don't even understand what the point in doing this would be, given they're a publicly traded company. Seems like a very careless decision. If they liked the app, they should've just copied the concept and feel of the app but rewritten the actual code. That way the GPL license would not apply.
Reading the whole passage is much more illuminating than that misattributed drek that Jobs misquoted thanks, likely, to a poorly researched biography:
“One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.”
We turn first to the parallel quotations from Massinger and Shakespeare collocated by Mr. Cruickshank to make manifest Massinger’s indebtedness. One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too close to them to be of use to them in this way. Massinger, as Mr. Cruickshank shows, borrows from Shakespeare a good deal. Let us profit by some of the quotations with which he has provided us—
Massinger: Can I call back yesterday, with all their aids
That bow unto my sceptre? or restore
My mind to that tranquillity and peace
It then enjoyed?
Shakespeare: Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrops of the world
Shall ever medecine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.
Well, any code that was built on top of GPLed code needs not to be closed source, in order to comply with the license that they accessed the code under.
No disagreement there. Mathnerd314 asked for proof of stolen code, which of course is difficult to provide when we're talking about a closed source product. So the original authors must resort to indirect proof like comparing visuals and inspecting the binary.
Comments
"Good artists borrow, great artists steal"
More seriously, he hasn't actually shown any stolen code, just that the app feels "surprisingly familiar" https://ma.tt/2016/10/wix-and-the-gpl/
Edit: I just checked the Android app and having a package named "org.wordpress.android.editor" matching the stuff in https://github.com/wix/WordPress-Editor-Android/tree/9f0e776... is pretty convincing.
Matt links to the relevant GitHub repo in his blog post: https://github.com/wix/react-native-wordpress-editor
If you look at that repo, what they are doing is totally unambiguous. The README literally acknowledges that they are using Wordpress code, describing the contents of the repository as a "React Native Wrapper for WordPress Rich Text Editor."
They applied the MIT license to their wrapper, which is using the GPL-licensed Wordpress code, and then they embed the whole thing in their proprietary app. They are now compelled to publish the source code of their entire application if they want to comply with the requirements of the GPL.
If they don't distribute it (SaaS only) then they do not need to publish anything.
That's not necessarily true. Some licenses consider html itself as protected code.
It's an iOS application. They are distributing it in the iOS App Store.
He mentioned that you can look and see on GitHub that Wix explicitly forked Wordpress repositories.
The gist I got was this - Wordpress was working on this in open source. Wix took their work, built on it, and didn't make their contributions open source, taking advantage of the repository and giving nothing back.
Which is fine if the code was BSD licensed, but the article states that Wordpress uses GPL, hence Wix may be violating the license regardless of the breach in attribution etiquette.
Although it seems against the spirit of GPL, the GPL doesn't explicitly protect against code hosted as a service, so the wix website isn't in violation. That's why AGPL exists.
IANAL, but their private fork (I couldn't find a public one on Github) is also technically permissible, as it's not a redistribution of the code.
Edit: if what's in question are strictly web assets (images, js, etc), then I'm pretty sure, but not certain, this is a violation
But the app is? If they release a modified version of a GPL Android app, they would need to supply the source code, no? The Wix app would constitute a derived work.
That seems fair. The GPL has a loophole for network-provided services, but apps are native.
Correct, unless WordPress goes AGPL then Wix can keep their hosted code to themselves. However, the Android App which they should of made themselves will need to be open sourced or taken down and open sourced. The GPL if I remember correctly makes it so upon request (thinking of BMW) you must be able to provide access to the source code, even if you sell the product, that means that whoever buys a GPL'd product from you must also receive the code, but if they didn't buy your product there should be no reason for them to have it if I'm not mistaken. The GPL is interesting, and while not my first choice, it's definitely not a terrible choice.
GPL is absolutely useless for commercial products, imo. Unless you can run it encapsulated on some sort of web service as a standalone executable. If the goal is to have more open source code, and more code sharing across systems and services then more code should actually be BSD licensed.
I don't think it's completely useless. If you have software you invested a lot of money into and the company goes out of business and you have your own internal engineers (maybe you didn't want to go this route beforehand because said product was good enough) now you can carry on without the main company. In the case of WordPress unless they disappear somehow, that is when a fork will come. Look at LibreOffice vs OpenOffice. MariaDB is a great example of someone selling a product they made for a LOT of money, and then continuing on with it, now that Oracle has taken MySQL some have taken to using MariaDB instead. Don't knock the GPL, it makes many things possible.
I totally agree on that, _BUT_ I can't use it in a commercial product without releasing my entire commercial source code? The GPL prohibits many commercial applications, and even if I would want to use in something, I often cannot, because it's not feasible to release my entire codebase. There's a lot of GPL software that's just off limits, exactly because of that. In a way, it contaminates commercial codebases. That makes me sad, because a lot of GPL code is of top notch quality.
Why not opt for a BSD license? The things you wrote also apply to BSD licensed open-source software.
If you're releasing your code, it's only to the customer. The one's who receive the code are only the ones who receive the binaries and ONLY upon request, think BMW's code they released upon a customers request. Sometimes it's better to use GPL or BSD, because some customers will not use your product if there is no code to guarantee if your company disappears they can't move on without you. Look at WordPress, their code's right there, and yet nobody can overshadow them yet.
Edit:
I agree with you, but I was mentioning GPL because you placed it in question. BSD is great, MS-PL is a little nicer if you need to protect any patents too.
Sounds like the GPL working exactly as intended.
I don't even understand what the point in doing this would be, given they're a publicly traded company. Seems like a very careless decision. If they liked the app, they should've just copied the concept and feel of the app but rewritten the actual code. That way the GPL license would not apply.
How much would that cost? A few hundred thousand?
You're assuming this is a decision made by executives, as opposed to lazy developers.
FYI: Wix open-sourced a ton of react-native stuff built internally to write the app in question: https://github.com/wix?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=react-native
Reading the whole passage is much more illuminating than that misattributed drek that Jobs misquoted thanks, likely, to a poorly researched biography:
“One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.”
T.S. Eliot
Did Eliot have something against the comma? Just wondering...
No, it's Goodreads that has mangled it; there is a better and complete version at Bartleby: http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw11.html.
We turn first to the parallel quotations from Massinger and Shakespeare collocated by Mr. Cruickshank to make manifest Massinger’s indebtedness. One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too close to them to be of use to them in this way. Massinger, as Mr. Cruickshank shows, borrows from Shakespeare a good deal. Let us profit by some of the quotations with which he has provided us— Massinger: Can I call back yesterday, with all their aids That bow unto my sceptre? or restore My mind to that tranquillity and peace It then enjoyed?
Shakespeare: Not poppy, nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrops of the world Shall ever medecine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou owedst yesterday.
How should he show code when the Wix app is closed source?
His post mentions "icons, class names, even bugs". That seems damning (just ripping icons would be a copyright violation on its own).
Well, any code that was built on top of GPLed code needs not to be closed source, in order to comply with the license that they accessed the code under.
No disagreement there. Mathnerd314 asked for proof of stolen code, which of course is difficult to provide when we're talking about a closed source product. So the original authors must resort to indirect proof like comparing visuals and inspecting the binary.
That code is about inspiration, not about literal theft.