At WordCamp Boston this past weekend there was a great Ignite talk session. The last Ignite speaker was Jane Wells of Automattic, Inc., the WordPress.com folks. She told us in 5 minutes and 20 slides with nary a breath, about the new WordPress Foundation founded as a charitable organization by Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress. I think this is a great thing. A Foundation serves a number of valuable purposes for a FOSS project:
- Protector of the code, if the Foundation owns the copyright and accepts contributions through a contribution agreement.
- Protector of the other IP including patents (but what self respecting FOSS project would own software patents?) and trademarks.
- Sponsor and participant for standardization efforts that dovetail with the project.
- Center of gravity for donations and common community resources such as developer grant programs, legal defense, and project infrastructure.
- Chief cheerleader and promoter, sponsoring events, providing spokespeople, establishing training and certification, and generally making positive noise about the project.
The WordPress Foundation is going to do a lot of this. They’ll own and license the trademark and logo, and sponsor WordCamps and other events. The rationale on the “About” page is surprising, however:
“The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come.”
What is interesting here is the claim that the Foundation will protect the code – presumably against the potential for ravaging by some evil corporation that might acquire the rights to the code base in an acquisition. Need an example? We just saw a nine-month standoff between the European Commission and Oracle over the Sun/Oracle merger and its potential to harm competition from MySQL in the database market. The EC determined ultimately that this merger was not anti-competitive, and it closed earlier today.
So who owns the copyright on WordPress? I asked Matt Mullenweg in a blog comment about this. His reply:
“Copyright is maintained by the original contributors of code, and licensed under the license of WordPress. (Which makes it highly unlikely we will ever change licenses.)”
So, WordPress is not like MySQL. With a code base that is owned by many authors, there is little danger of falling prey to an entity bent on harming the project or community. There is no way for a corporation to gain such control, when they’d have to find all those au
thors and negotiate copyright assignments with all of them. As Matt says, this also means that WordPress will forever be a GPL v2 project as there is no practical way to re-license the entire body of code.
The WordPress Foundation serves another purpose: it declares to the world that this project is ultimately owned by the community. Not just the code, but the trademark, the PR voice, and all the rest. Why does that matter?
Adoption!
Your last paragraph is misleading. The WordPress Foundation is owned and controlled by Matt Mullenweg. He appears to be the only named director. There is no community involvement and no community ownership – its just a clever marketing ploy by the individual who controls everything about WordPress and who makes a fortune from doing so.
@Daniel We’ll see where the WordPress Foundation goes as far as governance etc. Why do you think the WordPress Foundation is nothing more than a marketing ploy? Do you not see the value in having an independent organization responsible for protecting things like trademarks, promoting the platform, etc.? Since the code ownership is distributed, it is hard for me to see how Matt M. could be considered the sole owner. It is true that a small core team approves all the commits to the code base and manages the planning but that is true for a lot of projects, including the Linux kernel. How would you like to see it governed? Have you considered getting involved?
Daniel’s comment makes me think about the people who claim they have a right to sell WordPress plugins, fast and easy.
Hopefully the creation of the WordPress Foundation will slow them down.
The way I see it, nobody questioned the WordPress GPL vision only 2 years ago.
Now that WordPress’ ecosystem has reached critical mass, adding value to projects like WPMU with BuddyPress – and there’s a neat market for it now, but only now – some people claim a slice of the pie. That’s OK, Automattic never said it was forbidden. You just can’t do what you want, there are rules, thank God.
By the same token it’s easy to criticize the GPL. It certainly doesn’t facilitate making money. But hey! Would WordPress have grown that big without it? It’s a bit easy to say “we want change” now. It is certainly more difficult to play by the GPL rules and the temptation is great.
If the news spread that gold was to be found in large quantities in the YellowStone Park, surely quite a few people would like its status to be changed to allow private mining. (Some people are actually trying.)
Not so cool, or would it be?
I feel that’s the situation WordPress finds itself in right now.
It’s always easy to criticize a leader. Matt is a leader, and a pretty good one. The pressure will keep raising in the years to come.
Selling plugins is a bit like going for the easy gold. I mean, sure, it takes time to develop proper plugins for an ever richer framework such as WordPress, and time is money.
I suggest developing plugins for clients then giving back the code to the community is a proper way to do it.
Developing plugins for the sake of selling them directly isn’t.
My intuition is that it might kill the goose with the golden eggs.
Lumberjacks in the Amazonian forest have good reasons too. Felling trees is easy, you make fast money. Growing them, on the other hand, takes time and requires a special kind of spirit: you have to think about the future of the whole ecosystem, not just about one’s private interests.
I’m only too happy to see that the WordPress community “authorities” aren’t as powerless as the environmental organizations.
Are they hypocritical?
They don’t sell plugins, nor do they sell themes, right? They do sell services, on the other hand.
Which is way tougher.
The WordPress Foundation won’t make everyone happy.
But it is definitely there for the preservation of the community’s future interests.
@GeeCee Thanks for your comment! The rules you talk about do not prohibit selling plugins or themes and there are plenty of businesses doing exactly that. The GPL requires that copies of GPL-licensed code, or derivative works of such code, also be licensed under the GPL. The license also prohibits distribution of code combined with GPL-licensed code, unless that code is also GPL licensed. The GPL does not prohibit making money from GPL-licensed code. If you can figure out how to do that while abiding by the terms of the license, then you’re welcome to do so, and many businesses have figured it out.
Whether it is possible to create a WordPress theme or plugin that is not a derivative work of WordPress has been hotly debated – see http://www.webmaster-source.com/2009/01/29/why-theyre-wrong-wordpress-plugins-shouldnt-have-to-be-gpl/ for a typical thread. The answer to that question really can only be determined on a case-by-case basis, and such a case would require a copyright owner of some piece of WordPress (the copyright isn’t owned by a single entity) to file a civil suit alleging a violation of the license, against some plugin or theme author. All of that costs a lot of money. The WordPress Foundation is not one of those copyright holders and could not itself file such a suit. It could, however, pay for someone to do so. But really, do you think they would? What impact would such an attempt to strictly enforce the GPL have on the WordPress platform?
Why are you against developers making money from plugins or themes? In my experience, software ecosystems in which everyone gets to eat are the most successful. There is a persistent myth that FOSS communities are all about volunteers working for the love of code, and that such projects fail when their communities consist of self-interested developers. The reality though is that successful FOSS communities make it possible for people to make money, while not trampling on others’ rights to the commons. WordPress is just such a community, and that is the goose that lays those golden eggs.
Just today I bought a WordPress theme from WooThemes (http://www.woothemes.com) which is GPLed. I could have found a copy of it on the Internet somewhere, and according to the GPL license, it is legal for someone who has downloaded the code legally from WooThemes to distribute a verbatim copy of the theme’s code (but not the CSS or images). But I chose to pay WooThemes for the excellent support and frequent, high-value updates they provide to their paying customers. That is the model I think makes sense – deliver value, and charge a reasonable price for it, while abiding by the terms of the WordPress license.
Thanks again for your comment!
Hi Rich
I’m not against selling themes and plugins at all.
I am certainly not a code of love “taliban”, rest assured.
Some people are doing a great job. WooThemes is a perfect example, and there are many more in the same vein, like Justin Tadlock’s Theme Hybrid, for instance.
Plugins for sale are the new trend, I just question the way it is sometimes done and above all how Automattic is accused of being the sole beneficiary of the community’s efforts.
In that respect, Daniel’s comment triggered my spontaneous reply.
I had just been chatting with developers who wanted to discuss the possibility to start a wpplugins.com competitor and it felt like talking to gold diggers, as their words were fairly aggressive against Automattic.
Hence the somewhat passionate tone.
Your answer does offer a more balanced view of things.
#GeeCee Since there is no way, with distributed copyright and pure GPL, for a company to use licensing to distribute and charge money for a “pro” version of WordPress, the only way to make money on WordPress is to offer services. Nobody is going to get hugely rich on that model but anyone can create a hosted service like wordpress.com, an advanced plugin with either a support or hosted subscription model (Automattic could charge for IntenseDebate for example), professional themes with support, or a plugin “app store” like wpplugins.com, which incidentally requires plugins it hosts to be licensed under the GPL. I would say that Automattic has certainly benefited from the community’s efforts but nothing stops others from doing the same kinds of things, except ideas and hard work.
The valuable element here is the WordPress trademark. Automattic, with wordpress.com, is trading on the brand equity of the trademark, which now is owned by the WordPress Foundation. How the Foundation licenses and protects this trademark will be the bellwether of the intentions of its director(s). It costs real money to protect and license a trademark. Check out http://wordpressplugins.com for instance. I would be surprised to learn that the trademark was licensed for this use, though of course that is possible. Will the Foundation license the trademark in a way that benefits the community? Time will tell!