Category Archives: Open Source

Free and open source software, licensing, community, and why it matters.

A few interesting reads or listens:

Maker Taker

AI, Design, Open Source

My sister Charleen sent me this meme with the note “Someone needs to draw you in there with your arm up 🤣🤣🤣” It’s a nice ode to the Dries essay on Maker/Taker problems.

Well, thanks to the magic of AI, I asked the Nano Banana AI Studio to “make it so on the bottom one person raises their hand,” and it didn’t work at first. So, I tried a few other variations, and then, voilà!

Technology is amazing. And now we have a counter to the meme. Be that one hand that raises.

Although this is a joke, I’m going to give humanity a high-five because, compared to when I started in technology, which was more the Microsoft Halloween memo era, to where we are today, I’m so impressed that so many makers, creators, designers, engineers, and leaders have adopted the moral framework of open source being part of their calling. Businesses, too! I used to get laughed out of the room or had spears thrown at the security of open source, but that is no longer a blocker, and the conversation has really elevated. It doesn’t feel like one person raising their hand anymore; it’s grown into a truly special movement, a lens through which you can view almost anything.

Open source is the best way we have to set the foundation for future generations to build upon, ensuring the light cone of humanity’s technological expansion becomes something that belongs to all of us, not just a few.

Summer WordPress Update

AI, Automattic, Open Source, Review, Video, WordCamp, WordPress

I’m still buzzing from an incredible WordCamp US this week, from contributor day to the closing party the vibes were right and it was amazing to connect with fellow travelers in the journey towards creating a more free and open source internet.

Before our open town hall Q&A I was able to make some fun announcements:

  • Traffic to WordPress.org is up, and we’ve brought the plugin queue from months to basically a few days.
  • Previewed Block Comments and the upcoming Command Palette feature in 6.9.
  • Shared some fun AI experiments, including Felix’s AI chatbot demo, Automattic’s new Telex block creator, and more.
  • Got to announce details for the next two flagships:
    • WordCamp Asia 2026: Mumbai, India, from April 9th to 11th.
    • WordCamp Europe 2026: Kraków, Poland. June 4th to 6th 2026.
    • WordCamp US 2026: Phoenix, Arizona, from August 16th to 19th. 😅

Give it a watch!

Think Different

AI, Open Source, Tech, WordCamp, WordPress

Pretty heads down at WordCamp US, which has had amazing energy and talks so far. I wanted to take a moment to note two things, first being a great essay from Dave Winer asking people to Think Different about WordPress.

I’ve done this before — asked people to think differently about things, like public writing, with blogging. In the 90s I was running around the Vallley trying to explain to everyone that blogging was going to change everything, all I got was blank stares from people who said “we don’t do that.” They of course eventually did do it. But at first the ideas seemed foreign, unreasonable.

And in light of the news of Typepad shutting down, note that WordPress has a Typepad importer. A big advantage of putting your content into an open source platform like WordPress with an active community, vs just static pages or something custom, is that you’re getting constant upgrades “for free” as we maintain and iterate on the software, enabling new APIs or things like allowing your AI to talk to your site.

WordPress is built by a community of people deeply passionate about backwards and forward compatibility, radical openness so it’s easy to get things in and out of it, and relentless iteration building for the long term. Despite literally billions of dollars spent trying to kill or crush WordPress, and frequent proclamations of its death, we keep trucking along and doing our darndest to make the web a bit more open and free every day. It’s a life mission of many people, including myself.

The Future of WordPress and AI at WCUS

AI, Automattic, Open Source, Tech, WordCamp, WordPress

The presentations for WordCamp US are just a few days away! We have some really exciting keynotes including Danny Sullivan from Google, John Maeda from Microsoft AI, and Adam Gazzaley (one of the top neuroscientists in the world) from UCSF. I think being in the room and able to meet the speakers and ask questions is even more valuable this year, as things are changing so quickly. If you know anyone in or near Portland, Oregon have them get a ticket! Here are all the other AI-related talks:

MCP NYC Hackathon

AI, Automattic, Events, Facebook, New York, Open Source, Tech

Over the weekend, Automattic/Beeper had the pleasure of hosting and sponsoring the Build the Future MCP Hackathon in New York City organized by Adam Anzuoni, alongside Anthropic, Stainless, WorkOS, Smithery, and MongoDB. As someone deeply passionate about open-source technology and the potential of AI, I was thrilled to not only support this event but also to speak at it and serve as one of the judges. For those unfamiliar, MCP stands for Model Context Protocol and enables AI models to interact with multiple tools in a more efficient and structured manner, allowing developers to create sophisticated agents that can handle complex tasks. And it’s only 8 months old! The energy in the room was electric—hackers collaborating, iterating, and demoing groundbreaking projects in just a few hours. (I would love to see the results of a longer overnight or all-weekend hackathon.)

For a wrap-up of the winners, check out this great X/Twitter thread by Alex Reibman. The first-place winner, Levels AI, orchestrates different AI/ML models to solve specific business requirements without needing heavy manual coding or specialized teams. Essentially, it’s models creating more models—a meta-approach to AI that could streamline operations for companies of all sizes. Yusuf Olokoba said the name was inspired by Pieter Levels, which is pretty cool. I wanted to note one team in particular: BeepResearch, which used our early access Beeper API and local MCP.

Judging the entries was tough! People built so much cool stuff in a really short period of time. I always say technology is best when it brings people together, and this was a great example of that, and makes me very excited for Contributor Day at WordCamp US next week. (Which has such a stacked AI program as well.) Hopefully some people who enjoyed the office might consider getting 24/7 access.

I also just want to take a beat and say how amazing it is that I’m blogging this, on a United flight from Houston to San Francisco I’ve taken a million times, on a plane 36,000 feet in the air and technology is amazing. I can’t wait until United has Starlink!

Also last week the WordPress AI team shipped its MCP adapter!

Automattic Twenty

AI, Automattic, Open Source

We’re celebrating a fun anniversary at Automattic today, our 20th, with a fun look-back. Gosh, it’s been quite a journey, and it still feels like we’re just getting started in so many areas.

In 2005, being a remote-first company was anathema to investors and business leaders* at the time; it was a scarlet letter that combined with our embrace of Open Source and the relative inexperience got us some funny looks and a lot of skepticism. I will be forever grateful to the true contrarians who bet on Automattic in our earliest days.

Even when it was clearly working the first few years, there was always the dismissal of “that won’t scale” that loomed like a remote startup Great Filter. These days I hear from friends who run incubators or do seed investing that almost every company they look at taps into remote talent.

It makes me think about what uncommon things Automattic does today that will be standard in the coming decades. We do our best to balance idealism with pragmatism, because even if you are on the right side of history, being too early can be as bad as being wrong.

I can’t predict everything that will change over the coming decades, especially with AI making the next few years particularly hard to predict. Still, I do know a few things that won’t change: everything flows from our people, open source is still the most powerful idea of our generation, growth is the best feedback loop, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. People will always want fast, bug-free software; instant, omniscient customer service when they need it; and experiences so intuitive that they usually don’t. And once they’ve had a taste of freedom, it’s hard to return to their previous state. (For more, see our creed.)

Our industry is highly cyclical, and I feel fortunate to have gained the perspective of a few bubbles and crashes, along with all the emotions that go with them. It’s undeniable we’re in the very early days — the command-line times — of an AI era, and though it will probably have its own bubble and crash cycles, it feels as significant to me as anything since we started. It’s more important than ever that we fight for open source and the freedom-enhancing side of technology. I’m committed to doing whatever I can to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging, but there are many other areas of the human experience to cover… pick one to work on! It’s hard and rewarding work.

When I was working on an early version of one of our internal stats systems, it was really important to me that it showed rolling windows of the last 24 hours (daily), 168 hours, 4 weeks, and of course yearly. The rolling was important so you could see the impact of your changes as soon as possible. Then I felt called to add another: decade.

Some thought it was silly at the time, and it’s true that it initially served mainly as a way to display the cumulative number. But I wanted every time someone looked at one of these stats pages that they were reminded that we’re building for the long term. Our users and customers deserve nothing less. And now we have some statistics with 20 years of history, it has some useful comparisons as well!

In Ten Years of Automattic, I wrote:

There’s a lot more to do, and I can’t wait to see what a “20 Years of Automattic” post says. I’m a lucky guy.

Now we know! I’m still a very lucky guy, and can’t wait to build, learn, and share alongside a talented crew of like-minded hackers, dreamers, and doers.

* I’ll note that pioneers like Bob Young (Red Hat), Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Research), Jason Fried (37Signals), and Mårten Mickos (MySQL) were big inspirations. Also, the entire Open Source community and most projects operated at least partially this way, which is why it seemed so natural to us as a second-generation Open Source company.

The Five Layers of Sharing Thoughts and Ideas

Automattic, Open Source, Review, WordPress

I’ve been thinking a lot about mimetic formation, how a thought becomes an idea, and how that idea gestates and evolves as it’s progressively shared in wider and wider circles.

During a recent product review of Day One, I was struck by how central the app is to my perspective on humans, relationships, and what we share. There are several layers to it, ranging from your innermost thoughts to what you share with the world. Each layer has its own context, challenges, and possibilities, and Automattic offers technology and products tailored to each.

1. Layer one is your internal thoughts. Your consciousness, what exists only in your mind, or what I like to call meatspace. This space is yours and yours alone. This generative space is at the core of human creativity and existence.

2. Layer two is triggered as soon as you put something into a medium, like writing it down. It’s everything that leaves your head, but is just reserved for you. In the past, we only had physical journals. Today, we have Day One as our strongest product in this space, but many people also have a private WordPress installation just for themselves. There are so many tools out there that help you create! Colors, brushes, canvases. Harper, for example, helps you write better — think of it as an open-source Grammarly, right now just in a few limited contexts, but in the future everywhere you write. 

3. Layer three is you and someone else. This is everything you share with one other person, which is an incredibly sacred act. Shared journals on Day One, messaging on Beeper, DMs, private blogs with your best friend. A shared Google doc. This is its own special space. It has an intimacy and privacy that is core to the human experience. This is also phase 3 of Gutenberg, which is all about real-time co-editing and collaboration. This layer is the one I’m most excited about expanding in 2025 and 2026.

4. Layer four is sharing within a finite group. N+1. It’s a space of collaboration and brainstorming with families, tribes, and teams. P2, Linear, Github, group chats, and cozy communities. You lose some of the intimacy of layer three but gain more group intelligence.

5. Finally, we have the fifth layer. This is the public layer, where I have spent a lot of my time at Automattic. It is an extremely competitive space of social media and blogs: WordPress, WordPress.com, and Tumblr. Once you publish publicly, you open yourself up to the beauty and chaos of the wider world. The best reason to blog is comments, the people who find you and add to your thoughts, who you never would have imagined. This is a crucible, but makes your own writing and thinking so much better, it’s worth the mishegoss. 🙂

This has been kicking around in my head and at layer four for a while. Thanks to Kelly Hoffman for helping me get this to layer five.

P.S. Happy 22nd birthday to WordPress! Very excited about the new AI team on .org.

Berkshire Hathaway Meeting

AI, Automattic, Open Source, Travel, WordCamp, WordPress

I’ve checked off a bucket list item: I’m attending a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting. It’s really an event! Thousands flock to Omaha, Nebraska, for the legendary Q&A sessions with Warren Buffett and shareholder deals. They’ve made it quite the circus, with every Berkshire Hathaway company having a booth of some sort, and typically selling their goods at a discount or with exclusive items you can only buy there, like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Squishmallows (which of course I got, to complement my bronze busts).

It’s strange to have a Dairy Queen booth selling $1 ice cream (cash only!) next to NetJets, but those juxtapositions are part of the Berkshire vibe—it’s very high/low, like Costco (a big Berkshire holding). There’s also an element of WordCamps or a Salesforce Trailblazer event in that you can tell there’s a “type” of person that’s easy to spot who’s a Berkshire enthusiast. A lot of Berkshire brands are also WordPress users: Duracell, GEICO, Acme Brick, Berxi, MiTek. I think there is a lot of mimetic overlap between the values of open source and the values of building a Berkshire company.

As with any big gathering, the side events are also great, and I was honored to have a fireside chat with a friend and Buffett protégé, Tracy Britt Cool. To an audience of about 60+ CEOs in the Kanbrick community, we talked about Automattic’s history and some of the latest happenings in tech; AI was definitely on people’s minds in the Q&A. They had questions for me, but I also feel like I have a ton to learn from this group that has built founder or family-owned businesses with an average of 80-100M of revenue, the kind of thing that is the engine of the American economy.

It makes me pine for the day when we can have more shareholders in Automattic; I think it would be an amazing cohort of folks that believe in open source and the open web, invested together and learning from each other, and I could imagine an event very much like these shareholder meetings. It’s so much more powerful when you build a business where your customers are also a community.

Update: I knew this would be a special one because it was Warren’s 60th, but he really went above and beyond by announcing his intention for Greg Abel to take over as CEO at the end of the year. The standing ovation was a special moment, 60 years of 19.9% compounding returns! I think the future of Berkshire is very bright because he’s shared so much of his worldview that there are others that have made it their own.

Reflecting

Design, Open Source, Personal, WordPress

I know there’s been a lot of frustration directed at me specifically. Some of it, I believe, is misplaced—but I also understand where it’s coming from.

The passing of Pope Francis has deeply impacted me. While I still disagree with the Church on many issues, he was the Pope who broke the mold in so many ways, inspiring me and drawing me back to the Catholic faith I grew up with, with an emphasis on service, compassion, and humility. His passing on Easter Monday, a holiday about rebirth, feels historic. Moments like that invite reflection—not just on personal choices, but on the broader systems we’re a part of.

My life, which was primarily about generative creative work that was free for everyone to use, has been subsumed by legal battles. From the start, I’ve said this: after many rounds of negotiation that I approached in good faith, WPE chose to sue. In hindsight, those conversations weren’t held in the same spirit, and that’s unfortunate.

But we can’t rewrite the past. What we can do is decide how we move forward.

The maker-taker problem, at the heart of what we’ve been wrestling with, doesn’t disappear by avoiding it. If we’re serious about contributing to the future of open source, and about preserving the legacy of what we’ve built together, we need space to reset. That can’t happen under the weight of ongoing litigation. The cards are in WPE hands, a fight they’ve started and refuse to end.

So I’m asking for a moment of reflection for us all as stewards of a shared ecosystem. Let’s not lose sight of that.

Greatest Hits

Meta, Open Source, Travel, WordCamp

I’ve been blogging now for approximately 8,465 days since my first post on Movable Type. My colleague Dan Luu helped me compile some of the “greatest hits” from the archives of ma.tt, perhaps some posts will stir some memories for you as well:

Where Did WordCamps Come From? (2023)

A look back at how Foo Camp and Bar Camp inspired WordCamps.

Getting Real Feedback as a CEO (2018)

How do you make sure you get good information when you’re CEO? Something we’ve been trying that’s been working is having an anonymous internal forum. Like Blind, but internal to the company, and really anonymous, without anything linking a user ID to a comment.

Wix and the GPL (2016)

That time Wix built their closed-source mobile app on GPL code.

What I Miss and Don’t Miss About San Francisco (2015)

Self explanatory 🙂

Advice About Advice (2015)

Why you need to think things through from first principles and not just blindly follow advice.

Why the Web Still Matters (2014)

A guest post by Ben Thompson of Stratechery on why “the web is dead” comments were wrong in 2014. Still true today!

The Four Freedoms (2014)

A discussion of Stallman’s four open source freedoms. Our open source Bill of Rights, if you will.

The Intrinsic Value of Blogging (2014)

On ignoring vanity metrics and blogging for intrinsic reasons

What’s in My Bag 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2023, 2025

What I’ve been carrying in my travel bag 

Why Your Company Should Have a Creed (2011)

I’m really jazzed that dozens of companies have adopted this or similar ideas since then.

1.0 is the Loneliest Number (2010)

On the importance of releasing quickly and getting feedback.

The Twitter API (2010)

A discussion on the Twitter API missing the boat on, as Jack Dorsey put it, becoming a protocol.

I Miss School (2010)

Just like they say, youth is wasted on the young, I think I squandered school when I was in it.

What Startup Idea Would I suggest? Start a Bank (2009)

There’s been a lot of action in the payments space since 2009. For new companies, we have Square (2009), Stripe (2010), and Wealthsimple (2014), among others. Ally Bank (rebranded from GMAC in 2010) has also been trying to provide a modern customer-focused experience.

Six Steps to Kill Your Community (2009)

Platform and product anti-patterns.

In Defense of the GPL for Open Source Projects (2009)

This was a response to a popular post about how GPL open source projects would lose out to projects under licenses like MIT, BSD, and Apache. I didn’t agree then and I don’t agree now. 

The Way I Work (2009)

Self explanatory 🙂

Infrastructure as Competitive Advantage (2008)

On the importance of performance, reliability, and security. This was a core priority for us and it shows. We dominate the competition on third-party performance comparisons at the platform level and on the default user experience, and our security is top-notch.

The Price of Freedom and Open Source Licenses (2007)

A response to a user who wanted the ability to remove GPL freedoms from WordPress.

The PHP5 Transition (2007)

How PHP5 forced us to divert time and attention away from users to deal with migration costs.

Mitch Kapor vs. Mark Zuckerberg (2007)

At Startup School, Kapor advocated for having team diversity while Zuckerberg advocated for a “young and technical” because the best work comes from young people. Now that Facebook (Meta) has grown up, Zuckerberg is doing what Kapor said companies should do and not what Zuckerberg said companies should do! Zuckerberg’s trusted people aren’t young anymore and aren’t being replaced by the young.

Sun Isn’t Relevant to Startups (2007), and Followup (2007)

A discussion of Sun’s Startup Essentials program and Jonathan Schwartz’s (then CEO of Sun) reply.

The RSS Feed Validator is Dead to Me (2006)

The RSS 2.0 feed validator is old news today but the experience here is a good example of why people didn’t take any of these validators seriously and they’re all old news

There’s No Correlation Between Hours Worked and Work Done (2006)

Self explanatory 🙂

Should We Have Hidden Options? (2005)

A discussion of the hidden cost of hidden options.

We probably missed some, if there’s a post you think should be included leave it in the comments.

6.8

AI, Open Source, Themes, Travel, WordPress

WordPress 6.8 Cecil is out, and it’s a great release. It’s unbelievable that it’s already been downloaded over 6 million times as I write this. That feeling never gets old.

It’s a funny time in WordPress because there are a lot of really interesting open questions:

  • Can we iterate faster with canonical plugins?
  • What’s the fun thing we can put in to celebrate 7.0, and when will that be? (I was rooting for real-time co-editing like Notion/Canva/Google Docs.)
  • How can we use AI to automate our manual work around WordPress.org?
  • Can AI help us make 60k+ open source plugins and themes in the directory more secure? (I think so.)
  • What should we do with our 13k issue backlog? (That’s a lot of bug gardening.)
  • How will AI change how people build and update sites?
  • Just like RSS and web standards supercharged WordPress for the podcasting and search revolutions, what standards or APIs can we ship to help 40%+ of the web work with AI agents? (Plus an entire rabbit hole of all the new sloppy crawlers using so many resources.)

Some of these broad changes are mixed. At one point, I used Google to search for things and would visit their top result, which is great for website owners. Nowadays, Google pulls almost everything I need into the results page, so I don’t see as many random sites. But on Perplexity, sometimes I’ll read the answer and then visit 4-5 of the sources it cites to learn more, so I’m visiting 4-5x more random websites, usually powered by WordPress, than I would have even in the early days of Google. We don’t know how this all plays out yet.

These questions are also against the backdrop of some of the brightest minds in WordPress spending more time with legal code than computer code, which could last until 2027 or longer with appeals.

Speaking for myself, I was in my first deposition today. I really appreciated the due process and decorum of the rule of law, and just like code, law has a million little quirks, global variables, loaded libraries, and esoteric terminology. But wow, after a full day of that, I’m mentally exhausted. Hence, I’m posting about 6.8 after it’s had 6 million downloads. I’m more impressed than ever by what smart lawyers do, and the entire thing, though sometimes imperfect and frustrating, is a blessing to our democracy. However, I can’t wait to return to spending the plurality of my days with engineers and designers again. I’m sure many other folks in the WordPress community would agree.

On Lenny’s Podcast

Ideas, Open Source, Press, Video

One of my must-read newsletters for the past several years has been Lenny’s Newsletter, probably best known for its writing on growth and product management, which really means it covered everything you need to create a great company.

It expanded into a really well-done podcast; Lenny has always had a knack for finding the best guests and asking the best questions, so when he invited me on I was very excited.

He really wanted to address some of the things that people said I wasn’t being asked, so we do touch on the WP Engine / Silver Lake attacks, but we also covered a lot of my philosophy of why open source is important, philanthropy, and why you should build a movement, not just a product.

You can watch it on YouTube, or listen to it on your favorite podcast app like Pocket Casts.

Some others he has done that I really enjoyed are Nan Yu from Linear, Marc Benioff from Salesforce, Katie Dill from Stripe, Mihika Kapoor from Figma, Drew Houston from Dropbox, and of course the famous Founder Mode one with Brian Chesky.

Boom & Deepseek

What an exciting time to be alive. I was hipped to Deepseek by Andrej Kaparthy’s tweet the day after Christmas, it was clear then that something big had happened and that it was truly open source and open weights (not this fake Llama stuff). It’s been fun to see the rest of the world catch up to it, and how radically accessible and deployable these models will be for people to hack on. I don’t have any comment on public markets or stocks.

The other super inspiring thing today was Boom’s first supersonic flight. It’s worth watching the video. We’re 4-5 years away from halving flight times with supersonic flight. In that same timeframe we might have something even more dramatic from SpaceX, like Houston to Tokyo in 30 minutes. Really cool to see the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation around all of these things. It’s tempting to get distracted by drama (WPE and legal battles), but there’s such freedom and joy in just continuing to build, to engineer, to solve problems. I’m so grateful I get to do so every day with such incredible colleagues at Automattic.

Studio Sync

Design, Open Source, WordPress, WordPress.com

WordPress.com launched a new update to Studio this week, and we’re already seeing some buzz.

Studio is our free and open source app for local WordPress development, enabling you to spin up unlimited WordPress sites on your personal computer.

Through its newest feature, Studio Sync, you have complete freedom to:

  • Connect your Studio site to and from a WordPress.com production or staging site, included for free in Business and Commerce hosting plans.
  • Push and pull changes as a team by connecting a local Studio site to a shared WordPress.com site.
  • Synchronize your local and hosted sites at any time with one click.

Studio is an excellent tool to have in your development arsenal, and you can download it for free, explore the docs, and become a contributor on GitHub.

UH Magazine, Revisiting My Alma Mater

My father attended University of Houston, and it’s where I went to college to study political science, I started WordPress when there, and then dropped out after two years to move to San Francisco. It was fun seeing UH Magazine feature an article about my journey from a University of Houston student to co-founding WordPress and leading Automattic. I was surprised they put me on the cover of the physical edition! I wish my Dad were still around to see it.

The piece explores my commitment to open-source, my vision for democratizing online publishing, and the values of creativity and adaptability that have shaped my path. It’s an honor to reflect on these experiences with my alma mater.

DrupalCon Singapore

Automattic, Ideas, Open Source, Tech

This week, DrupalCon Singapore is bringing together an incredible community of Drupal platform creators, developers, and supporters. 

Last year, I had the chance to share the stage with Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, and the conversation stuck with me. It highlighted the profound impact we can have when communities like ours come together to push the boundaries of Open Source and shape the future of the web.

At Automattic, we believe that Open Source is more than a license—it’s a philosophy that drives innovation and makes publishing accessible to all, and we want to support fellow open source communities. Our team is at DrupalCon to share some of the tools we’ve built, including Akismet (check out the Drupal extension here), The Atavist Magazine, Beeper, Day One, Longreads, and Pocket Casts. These products, much like the web itself, thrive on connection and collaboration. (Basically all our non-WP stuff.)

I’ve loved hearing about how people are engaging with our booth—whether exploring our tools, grabbing a local snack, or taking a moment to recharge. For those of you at the event, I encourage you to swing by the Automattic booth, meet our team, and share your thoughts. Together, we can continue to create an open web that’s full of possibilities.

Welcoming Harper

Automattic, Books, Open Source

As announced by Automattic and covered by TechCrunch, I want to take a moment to welcome Elijah Potter and Harper to join Automattic. Harper is a super-fast (way faster than LanguageTool and Grammarly), local English grammar checker. The technology is nascent, but I’m very excited to embed this throughout all of Automattic’s products, and then expanding it to other languages, all in an open source way that can be embedded everywhere. I’m a huge fan of Grammarly and use it every day, but I think we’re doing too much in the cloud right now and there is so much compute and potential at the edge, and I’m excited to drive that forward with projects like Harper, Gutenberg, and Playground.

GPL Clarification

Open Source, Politics,

A quick followup on my prior conversation with Theo.

During that chat, I talked briefly about a trademark infringer that was also distributing nulled plugins. I said “Not illegal. Legal under the GPL. But they weren’t changing the names. They were selling their customers Pro Plugins with the licensing stuff nulled out.”

I want to be clear that my reference to legality and GPL was solely focused on the copying and modifying of the code. That is one of the key freedoms of open source and GPL: the right to copy and modify GPL code.

I was not speaking about their right to charge money for nulled plugins. GPLv2 prohibits that because they aren’t providing physical copies or support. This is very different from reputable web hosts, who provide hosting and support for websites and e-commerce stores.