Exciting news on the WordPress front: Not only has version 1.5 surpassed 100,000 downloads, but, apparently, WordPress, Inc. has officially been formed.
Let’s just hope that they don’t go the Six Apart direction and suddenly find the need to close source WP. (Not that any of their previous behavior would show a willingness to go this route. Their dedication to Open Source philosophy and goals when it comes to the WordPress project is admirable in the extreme).
Sweet.
WordPress, Incorporated
Let me assure you, we’re not going corporate. As Jackson so eloquently put it, it’s my job to keep that “corporate” out of “incorporated”. Everyone I spoke with, and myself of course, is clear on one thing — WordPress will stay, completely, Open Source. No tricks, no exclusions, no fees, no forks.
I’ll write more about our business model, and how we expect to use it to make sure that WP stays actively developed _and_ free as in beer, spirit, and code.
I figured as much. Y’all are a model project when it comes to open access to sources, open development process, etc.
Now if we could only get Linus away from BitKeeper…
*grin*
“Let’s just hope that they don’t go the Six Apart direction and suddenly find the need to close source WP.”
Movable Type was never open source, but we’ve only ever been releasing more and more code with open licenses, and we’ve put a lot of resources into LiveJournal, which is GPLed. So I’m not sure what you mean here.
Would it be better if I had said “suddenly found the need to make their license far more restrictive”?
Or worse…could make a buck from it?
Tony:
Not quite sure of what you’re trying to say.
As I’ve thought about this issue further, I realize that I made a critical mistake when considering the licensing of MT (as, apparently, did a lot of MT users in the past): I conflated MT’s previous free-as-in-beer licensing to also be free-as-in-speech. The error of this assumption has become abundantly clear, as the vehemence with which many MT users reacted to the license change attests to. It’s critical that you understand the license(s) for the software you use. It’s too bad that most people don’t take the time to understand just what they’re signing up for when they click an “I Agree” click-wrap agreement.
I applaud the WordPress team for their decision to use the GPL because when it comes down to it, should WP, Inc. close its doors or the WP team try to change its license, I can simply take the GPL’d codebase and go home, as it were.
I guess what I was trying to say is that the only thing worse than going from GPL to closed source is to go from ‘free for all’ to ‘pay by all’.