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Comment by pointlessone | Hacker News Reader

Do they use a product? WordPress’ license is GPL. However unfair it might feel they can use it under the terms of the license. Matt has chose the license and has to live with that choice. He’s doing basically the same thing Redis/Elastic Search/Mongo did but worse. He wants the money without getting the relicensing backlash. Which, I’d argue, is even worse than those other instances.

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He can't relicense as WordPress is a fork of B2 which is GPL. That's one reason why he's trying to extort instead.

I don’t think the fact that it’s a B2 fork is relevant. He wouldn’t be able to relicense even if it wasn’t a fork but initially chosen GPL.

Based on my understanding, this is not how it works.

IP issues withstanding, the owner of a software can relicense any time they want.

Any software released in the past would still be subject to the GPL.

So, if Matt decided to make WordPress closed source, previous versions would still be licensed under the terms of the GPL.

According to `git blame`, Matt isn't the sole, or even majority, owner of the WordPress codebase.

I understand your point, but that wasn’t my point. And in terms of reality, it’s easy to argue that Matt is the effective owner of the codebase.

The reality is that copyright law treats the author, not maintainer, as owner. Matt is the author of less than 1% of the codebase by line. To relicense, he would need consent from the remaining 99%. I'm not sure how you could argue otherwise.

Yes, if everyone signed a CLA with copyright assignment, as is common in some projects that are still nevertheless GPL, then he could relicense, but because he has not done that (and because it's actually a fork initially), he cannot relicense.

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