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Comment by tomdell | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>>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

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