The messy WordPress drama, explained
theverge.com
theverge.com
It hasn't kept up with the latest events (like MM disabling WPE's svn access), but the author possibly has a life on weekends, unlike me.
The GPL license (and the FSF) is not against the idea of using GPL'd software for commercial purposes. This is why many GNU/Linux distributions offer paid support, and is how Red Hat and Canonical make money by selling premium support for a product whose source code is available anyway.
In fact, restricting access to the software for reasons such as "you are not allowed to make money with this software", is against the Four Essential Freedoms that the GPL adheres to. Just take a look at the FSF License List [1]. Even if it's for political, commercial or humanitarian reasons, forbidding a group from using the software will mark the entire license as non-free.
They could move to GPLv3, or even to AGPL, which is more appropriate for server-side software that runs over the network anyway. However, as another comment in this thread has pointed out, hosting companies will not appreciate the move and will probably fork to get away with it. And if this happens, then WordPress is doomed, just like other products that have switched licenses in the past such as Redis, Terraform or Elasticsearch [2]. They got tired of being ransacked by other companies that didn't spend resources on the product, but they lost momentum because they were forked and people went with the fork.
This is precisely why at the same time I understand the motives of Matt behind what he's doing, because there is precedent that some companies will just want the glory without the grind. However, there is probably no legal basis for the actions he's taking right now.
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#NonFreeSoftwa... [2]: In fact, ElasticSearch recently announced that they were now adding AGPL as an option, but time will say if this change came too late or not.
>The hosting platform was acquired by the private equity firm Silver Lake in 2018
Being acquired by a private equity firm usually never ends well.
>Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your open source ideals — it just wants return on capital.
This I believe.
>But WP Engine is ultimately abiding by the rules of WordPress’ open-source license
Since WP is under the GPLv2 and if WP Engine is conforming to the GPL, I agree with this. Maybe WP should move to the GPLv3 ?
>either by paying a licensing fee or making contributions to the open source WordPress project
Is WP Engine not releasing source changes to the public ? If so I think this is a GPL violation.
I guess the outcome is as usual, the users suffer the most.
It's true that Automattic could switch their to distribution to GPLv3 (unlike Linux, it's "GPLv2 or later"). This would release a shitstorm of biblical proportions from every WP host on the planet, not just WPE. It would guarantee at least one fork becoming adopted by many of those hosts. Certainly many hours of entertainment.