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Comment by brazzledazzle | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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?

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.

The Open Source Initiative[1] is a good place to start.

1 - https://opensource.org/

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

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.

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