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Show Notes
Disclaimer & Correction
[FALSE STATEMENT] In this episode Mike mentioned that the GPL open source license requires any fork to add any feature that they've created ontop of the forked repo back into the original codebase. This is an incorrect interpretation of the GPL license.
In reality the GPL license only has these rules:
The GNU General Public License (GPL) is a widely used open-source license that ensures software freedom. Under the GPL:
- Freedom to Use: Anyone can use the software for any purpose.
- Freedom to Study and Modify: Users can access and modify the source code.
- Freedom to Share: Users can distribute the software freely, either in its original or modified form.
- Freedom to Derive: Any modifications or derivative works must also be distributed under the GPL license if shared publicly.
Freedom to derive is the one that was interpreted incorrectly.
Introduction
- Wordpress drama breakdown
- Open source is being a huge business
What is happening with WordPress?
- Wordpress.com vs wordpress.org
- Wordpress powers 40% of the internet
- Compared to 5% with React + Vue
- Who is Matt Mullenwegs
- Co-founder of wordpress
- Founded Automatic the company behind wordpress.com
- Automatic is valued at 7 Billion dollars (2022)
- Huge advocate of open-source software
- Other than some minor drama about flaunting his wealth by buying an expensive domain to spite someone, has stayed out of the news
- Wp engine
- Competitor to wordpress.com
- Accused by Matt of profiting from wordpress open source without giving anything back
- Created/bought two of the most popular wordpress plugins ACF and wp graphql
- Matt publicly called out WPengine for not contributing enough to wordpress open source
- Both in monetary (asking for a ridiculous 8% profits)
- And code contributions from WP engine devs asking devs to contribute 5% of their time
- Matt blocked wordpress.org access to WP engine customers leaving them unable to update their plugins
- WPengine filed a lawsuit against automattic and Matt
- Tons of developers have left Automattic
- Matt has escalated further by taking over the ACF plugin that was owned by WPengine and putting a Secure Custom Fields plugin in it’s place, stealing their code and all their users
- Matt has also placed a checkbox on the wordpress.org page (Which hosts all the plugins and control panels) asking if the person logging in is associated with WPengine before being allowed to login
- Matt has tried to poach the WPEngine CEO using pretty shady and borderline legal tactics
- He essentially blackmailed her saying if she doesn’t accept the job he’d tell her board she was thinking about accepting it
- Why is this important
- Wordpress powers 40% of the web
- Matt putting arbitrary values on what he expects from people to contribute to his OPEN SOURCE project is a dangerous precedent
- Attacking customers directly to put pressure on a provider put normal people in the line of fire for no reason
- If this open source project crumbles, what’s stopping the rest from going down this route?
- Potentially a new Wordpress fork will be created as an after math of this which will severely fracture the ecosystem
Monetizing Open Source Projects
- In general I think we’ve started to see these massive open source projects look for different ways to monetize
- Another good example of this is Redis changing their license and causing a bunch of forks to happen
