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Matt gave away the software he invented and founded a commercial venture to monetize his efforts despite this. Automattic originally registered the trademarks. Years later they donated them to the foundation, to make the marks available for noncommercial use and limited commercial use. In the process Automattic retained the exclusive commercial license to the marks.

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Where is the invention? He forked b2/cafelog and continued work on it when the original project faded out. He had no choice but to give it away unless he wanted the only WordPress install in the world. Another fork like b2evolution or any of the billion blogging tools at the time would have taken the spot WordPress did instead.

>Where is the invention?

“it would be nice to have the flexibility of Movable Type, the parsing of Textpattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger. Someday, right?” Synthesis is a type of invention: https://evanm.website/2016/03/synthesis-over-invention/

>Another fork like b2evolution or any of the billion blogging tools at the time would have—

People love to say things like this about any and all products but there’s this overwhelming counterpoint of what actually happened.

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