Back when blogging was just starting out, MovableType was the most popular platform. Written by Ben and Mena Trott, it was open source and written in perl.
It was awesome, super popular and could have been WordPress today.
They raised funding. Possibly under VC pressure, they made the license terms more closed source and restrictive.
Meanwhile, Matt Mullenweg had forked b2 and created WordPress under GPL.
When MovableType went closed source/more restrictive, their users fled to WordPress. The rest is pretty much history.
So what this historical context helps us understand is that firstly, WordPress/Automattic is very careful about ever going closed source with anything because they learned their lessons thanks to MovableType and what happened to them.
So WP has chosen to be open source, stay open source and defend open source because history has shown that is what the market wants and if you don't do that, they'll divorce you.
Living in that world as a multi-million (billion?) dollar company is a tough gig because, as Matt himself did with B2, anyone can fork your code and run with it.
But the one thing that WP/Automattic can count on is the GPL. If someone does fork the code, they are forever bound by the same competitive constraints that Automattic/WP is bound by. In other words: someone else can fork their code and so on in perpetuity.
So as long as WP enforces the GPL over WordPress, they will never have a competitor stronger than they are who can develop proprietary IP off their platform and gain a competitive advantage. The GPL ensures that anything created out of WordPress is always available to all competitors. And the competitor with the greatest head-start wins and that's WordPress.
This is really the basis for how multi-billion dollar companies are built out of open source. They count on the GPL to ensure everything they create never becomes a proprietary competitive advantage to a competitor that isn't also available to them.
So Matt M has a strategic imperative to always enforce the GPL on everything open source they do, or else they're building the foundation of the company that will kill them.
How could they enforce the GPL against a company offering Wordpress as a SaaS application? This Wix app is different since it's a mobile app I believe. Unless WordPress uses a version of GPL that accounts for SaaS they couldn't do much about anything but someone offering on-prem solutions or actual apps right?
You are correct. Since WP is GPLv2, there's nothing to prevent a hosting provide installing WP, making changes, and charging for the 'enhanced' service and keeping the code for themselves, because the hosted app isn't being 'distributed' to end users. (There may indeed be some nuance if part of WP is client-side JavaScript...)
And this is exactly the case that Affero GPL was written for. (Affero is a modification to GPLv3.)
I'd like to know what is the most Stallmanite license out there. The kind that corporate lawyers would like to stay far away from, that forces downstream projects to be as open as the source.
Affero GPL. If the public can touch the product or service, you have to provide the source. My company avoids incorporating any GPL-licensed libraries, even those with linking exceptions.
Comments
Back when blogging was just starting out, MovableType was the most popular platform. Written by Ben and Mena Trott, it was open source and written in perl.
It was awesome, super popular and could have been WordPress today.
They raised funding. Possibly under VC pressure, they made the license terms more closed source and restrictive.
Meanwhile, Matt Mullenweg had forked b2 and created WordPress under GPL.
When MovableType went closed source/more restrictive, their users fled to WordPress. The rest is pretty much history.
So what this historical context helps us understand is that firstly, WordPress/Automattic is very careful about ever going closed source with anything because they learned their lessons thanks to MovableType and what happened to them.
So WP has chosen to be open source, stay open source and defend open source because history has shown that is what the market wants and if you don't do that, they'll divorce you.
Living in that world as a multi-million (billion?) dollar company is a tough gig because, as Matt himself did with B2, anyone can fork your code and run with it.
But the one thing that WP/Automattic can count on is the GPL. If someone does fork the code, they are forever bound by the same competitive constraints that Automattic/WP is bound by. In other words: someone else can fork their code and so on in perpetuity.
So as long as WP enforces the GPL over WordPress, they will never have a competitor stronger than they are who can develop proprietary IP off their platform and gain a competitive advantage. The GPL ensures that anything created out of WordPress is always available to all competitors. And the competitor with the greatest head-start wins and that's WordPress.
This is really the basis for how multi-billion dollar companies are built out of open source. They count on the GPL to ensure everything they create never becomes a proprietary competitive advantage to a competitor that isn't also available to them.
So Matt M has a strategic imperative to always enforce the GPL on everything open source they do, or else they're building the foundation of the company that will kill them.
How could they enforce the GPL against a company offering Wordpress as a SaaS application? This Wix app is different since it's a mobile app I believe. Unless WordPress uses a version of GPL that accounts for SaaS they couldn't do much about anything but someone offering on-prem solutions or actual apps right?
You are correct. Since WP is GPLv2, there's nothing to prevent a hosting provide installing WP, making changes, and charging for the 'enhanced' service and keeping the code for themselves, because the hosted app isn't being 'distributed' to end users. (There may indeed be some nuance if part of WP is client-side JavaScript...)
And this is exactly the case that Affero GPL was written for. (Affero is a modification to GPLv3.)
any recommended resources to learn more about licenses, differences and when to consider what?
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/
While I don't know if this site offers advice, when I need a quick summary that explains the license the first place I check is https://tldrlegal.com
The Open Source Initiative[1] is a good place to start.
1 - https://opensource.org/
I'd like to know what is the most Stallmanite license out there. The kind that corporate lawyers would like to stay far away from, that forces downstream projects to be as open as the source.
Affero GPL. If the public can touch the product or service, you have to provide the source. My company avoids incorporating any GPL-licensed libraries, even those with linking exceptions.
They could switch to the AGPL https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html
Does wordpress use much javascript now? IANAL, but if so, downloading it could count as distributing the under the GPL.