Category Archives: Open Source

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

Response to DHH

Automattic, Design, Open Source, Politics, WordPress

I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. I shouldn’t let this stuff get to me, but it clearly did, and I took it out on DHH, who, while I disagree with him on several points, isn’t the actual villain in this story: it’s WP Engine and Silver Lake.

A few bullets to his core points:

  • The headline “Automattic is doing open source dirty” is not fair.
  • Automattic did not work on a deal with WP Engine for 18+ months because of the GPL, or them using “WP” in their name, it was because of their abuse of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks. Trademarks must be protected, as evidenced by Rails trademark policy.
  • Our C&D is about public trademark abuse; theirs is about censorship, and doxxes private messages. They have since filed a kitchen sink lawsuit that embroils all of WordPress.org.
  • Updating ACF to Secure Custom Fields in our directory was to provide users of our plugin directory the best, safest, most secure code. It included a security update that still has not been merged by the ACF team.
  • We will merge any improvements ACF makes to their GPL code going forward and will also include enhanced functionality in the coming days to provide a secure and free drop-in replacement for ACF. If WP Engine didn’t want this to happen, they should not have published their code under the GPL or distributed it through WordPress.org’s directory.
  • I think it’s fantastic when businesses are built on open source, the WordPress ecosystem is at least 10B+ a year; Automattic and WP Engine are less than 5% of that.

On with Theo / T3.gg

Interview, Open Source, Press, Tech, Travel, WordPress

On Thursday, a prominent developer, YouTuber, Twitch streamer, and journalist posted a video titled This might be the end of WordPress. It was very harsh. In that video you’ll hear him say about me, “he’s a chronic hater” (7:55), “seems like he’s been a pretty petty bastard for a long time now” (10:22), “I hate this shit, I hate when people are assholes and they get away with it because I’m doing it for the greater good, the fake nice guy shit. I’ll take an asshole over a fake nice guy any day, people whose whole aesthetic is being nice, I hated it.” (11:25), “Honestly I’d rather the license just be explicit about it than this weird reality of ‘If you get popular enough you can still use it but the guy who made WordPress is going to be an asshole to you.’ That seems much worse than most open source models.” (14:39)… it goes on.

Ouch!

However, one of my colleagues Batuhan is a follower of Theo’s and suggested I engage with him. It turns out we were both in San Francisco, and he was game for a livestreamed, no-conditions interview at his studio. I believe discussion is the best way to resolve conflict, that’s why my door is open to Lee Wittlinger, Heather Brunner, Brian Gardner, or any WP Engine or Silver Lake representative who wants to talk to resolve things.

Saturday afternoon I went to Theo’s studio, we had a vigorous two hour debate and discussion with some real-time chat polling that also changed my mind on a few things, and his, too. I left feeling like I had a new friend. ️And met some awesome cats. Check out the video.

WPE & Trademarks

Automattic, Open Source, Politics, WordPress

I’ve been writing and talking about WP Engine a lot in the last week, but I want to be crystal clear about the core issue at play.

In short, WP Engine is violating WordPress’ trademarks. Moreover, they have been doing so for years. We at Automattic have been attempting to make a licensing deal with them for a very long time, and all they have done is string us along. Finally, I drew a line in the sand, which they have now leapt over.

We offered WP Engine the option of how to pay their fair share: either pay a direct licensing fee, or make in-kind contributions to the open source project. This isn’t a money grab: it’s an expectation that any business making hundreds of millions of dollars off of an open source project ought to give back, and if they don’t, then they can’t use its trademarks. WP Engine has refused to do either, and has instead taken to casting aspersions on my attempt to make a fair deal with them.

WordPress is licensed under the GPL; respect for copyright and IP like trademarks is core to the GPL and our conception of what open source means. If WP Engine wants to find another open source project with a more permissive license and no trademarks, they are free to do so; if they want to benefit from the WordPress community, then they need to respect WordPress trademark and IP.

Further reading:

Are Investors Bad?

Automattic, Open Source, WordPress

Some people have been interpreting my comments around private equity and investors as saying they’re all bad and you should never accept investment or trust a company that does… I don’t agree with that at all. Investors are amazing, they’re the fuel of entrepreneurship and capitalism and responsible for most of what we enjoy today. I can look in the eye of another founder and wholeheartedly recommend Automattic’s investors—True Ventures, Addition, Tiger Global, Salesforce, GIC, ICONIQ, LVMH/Aglaé, Akkadian, Wellington, Sweetwater, Alta Park, Schonfield, Chris Sacca…—and say they’ve upheld open source values and allowed us to nourish the open source ecosystem and flourish as a business. (They’re not an investor, but there are new folks like OSS Capital which are totally open source aligned.)

So investors, even “private equity” ones can be okay, but just like with anything, there are good ones and bad ones, so it is worthwhile to look into their track record. After an investor joins a company, what happens next? Do they change away from an Open Source license? Does the community flourish or wither on the vine as a result of their actions? It can be complex because you can have, as we do in WordPress, some companies contributing and some companies just taking. Some investors, like ours, are minority investors, which means they don’t control the company. Some buy a majority share in companies and control them, and that’s where who ultimately owns things matters the most.

Can they change? Of course. Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. I think everyone should be afforded that grace. But it can’t just be in words, it has to be in action.

I may make my keynote tomorrow a deep dive presentation into some specific examples of this going poorly, because I think it’s highly relevant to WordPress’ survival. Tune in! There will be a livestream here.

WordCamp US & Ecosystem Thinking

AI, Audrey, Facebook, Open Source, Tech, WordCamp, WordPress

(This post should be read while listening to Wish by Joshua Redman. The writing is synchronized to the music reading speed.)

Contributor day just wrapped up for Portland for WordCamp US. If you ever have a chance to visit a WordCamp, I recommend it. It’s an amazing group of people brought together by this crazy idea that by working together regardless of our differences or where we came from or what school we went to we can be united by a simple yet groundbreaking idea: that software can give you more Freedom. Freedom to hack, freedom to charge, freedom to break it, freedom to do things I disagree with, freedom to experiment, freedom to be yourself, freedom expressed across the entire range of the human condition.

Open Source, once ridiculed and attacked by the professional classes, has taken over as an intellectual and moral movement. Its followers are legion within every major tech company. Yet, even now, false prophets like Meta are trying to co-opt it. Llama, its “open source” AI model, is free to use—at least until “monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month.” Seriously.

Excuse me? Is that registered users? Visitors to WordPress-powered sites? (Which number in the billions.) That’s like if the US Government said you had freedom of speech until you made over 50 grand in the preceding calendar year, at which point your First Amendment rights were revoked. No! That’s not Open Source. That’s not freedom.

I believe Meta should have the right to set their terms—they’re smart business, and an amazing deal for users of Llama—but don’t pretend Llama is Open Source when it doesn’t actually increase humanity’s freedom. It’s a proprietary license, issued at Meta’s discretion and whim. If you use it, you’re effectively a vassal state of Meta.

When corporations disingenuously claim to be “open source” for marketing purposes, it’s a clear sign that Open Source is winning.

Actual Open Source licenses are the law that guarantees freedom, the bulwark against authoritarianism. But what makes Open Source work isn’t the law, it’s the ethos. It’s the social mores. It’s what I’m now calling Ecosystem Thinking: the mindset that separates any old software with an open source license from the software that’s alive, that’s humming with activity and contributions from a thousand places. 

Ecosystem Thinking has four parts:

  1. Learn
  2. Evolve
  3. Teach
  4. Nourish

Learn is about keeping ourselves in a beginner’s mind, the curiosity to always engage with new ideas and approaches.

Evolve is where we apply those learnings to our next iteration, our next version. We see how things work in the real world: it’s the natural selection of actual usage.

Teach is actually where we learn even more, because you don’t really know something until you teach it. We open source our knowledge by sharing what we’ve learned, so others can follow on the same path.

Nourish is the trickiest, and most important part: it’s where we water the garden. If you’ve done the previous three steps, you’ve been very successful; now your responsibility is to spread the fruits of your labors around the ecosystem so that everyone can succeed together. This is the philosophy behind Five For the Future, which you’re going to see us emphasize a lot more now.

That’s the ecosystem. But if it’s the yin, what’s the yang? This openness and generosity will attract parasitic entities that just want to feed off the host without giving anything back. There are companies that participate in the Learn/Evolve/Teach/Nourish loop like a FernGully rainforest, and there are those who treat Open Source simply as a resource to extract from its natural surroundings, like oil from the ground.

Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital.

So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers? Newfold, especially since its acquisition of Yoast and Yith, gives back. (I’ve asked them to consolidate their Five for the Future pages to better represent the breadth of their contributions.) So does Awesome Motive, 10up, Godaddy, Hostinger, even Google. Think about that next time it comes up to renew your hosting or domain, weigh your dollars towards companies that give back more, because you’ll get back more, too. Freedom isn’t free.

Those of us who are makers, who create the source, need to be wary of those who would take our creations and squeeze out the juice. They’re grifters who will hop onto the next fad, but we’re trying to build something big here, something long term—something that lasts for generations.

I may screw up along the way, or my health may falter, but these principles and beliefs will stand strong, because they represent the core tenet of our community: the idea that what we create together is bigger than any one person.

(Hat tip to Automattician Jordan Hillier for the great ecosystem image.)

Update: I ended up presenting this post and furthering the case against Silver Lake and WP Engine at WordCamp US on September 20th.

A nice new WordPress 6.6 is out, our 50th release, on the same day people are getting hit with huge bills from Webflow. I really enjoy working in Open Source. There is no more customer-centric license. There’s some really fun stuff cooking, too, I can’t wait to show y’all.

50 releases… wow. No matter what happens in the world, we’re just going to keep cranking. Three times a year. Relentlessly. A little better each time. Don’t believe me, just watch.

Cowen Life Lessons

Open Source, WordCamp, WordPress

Sriram Krishnan calls Tyler Cowen one of the best talent spotters.

I take a few life lessons from Tyler, who I consider a mentor even though we’ve spent, at most, dozens of minutes together in the past several decades. (Don’t constrain your mentors by their availability, engage with their work!)

  1. He has blogged consistently on Marginal Revolution since 2003. As he learns he shares, and that’s a lighthouse beacon attracting smart people around the world with similar interests. So the lesson is: blog!
  2. He keeps himself open to engagement, with his email address being public. He reads and responds to his own emails.
  3. He treats everyone with with respect. I was a kid no one had heard of when I met him at an economics conference in 2003, but he spoke to me with the same respect and attention he gave to Milton Friedman, who was also there.

His advice to me was simple but true: Write every morning. Be more ambitious. Because it was coming from him I took it seriously. It’s all very open source. (I’m very curious to see how economic theory and open source intersect in the coming years, I think there’s a lot in the open source world that is novel and useful.)

I’m inconsistent compared to him in those three things but I look up and aspire to the example he sets, especially within the WordPress community where I keep myself easy to reach on the community Slack or talking to people at WordCamps. (Like WordCamp Europe in Turin next week!)

Beeper & Texts

Automattic, Marketing, Open Source, Personal

It’s such a delight when a plan comes together and unfolds, especially when it’s something you’ve been working on for many years. Today the announcement went out that we’re combining the best technology from Beeper and Texts to create a great private, secure, and open source messaging client for people to have control of their communications. We’re going to use the Beeper brand, because it’s fun. This is not unlike how browsers have evolved, where solid tech and encryption on top of an open ecosystem has created untold value for humanity. Eric Migicovsky has written well about the plan going forward.

A lot of people are asking about iMessage on Android… I have zero interest in fighting with Apple, I think instead it’s best to focus on messaging networks that want more engagement from power-user clients. This is an area I’m excited to work on when I return from my sabbatical next month.

On the Reddit IPO

Automattic, Open Source, WordPress

I’m looking forward to the Reddit IPO, and I think it’s awesome that they opened up a top-tier IPO tranche to their community. People with 200,000 karma points or 5,000 moderator actions on Reddit will get access to something that has previously been reserved for the most elite allies of financial institutions. Wow!

I’m sure this was not easy to do so Reddit users should understand that at this very important juncture in the company’s history it has gone above and beyond to include you. I’m mostly a lurker on Reddit so my 958 karma doesn’t qualify so I’ll get access with the rest of the normal folks.

If I ever IPO something from Automattic, it will include the same for people who have contributed to WordPress. And every supporting open-source project underneath it. (It’s turtles all the way down.)

My only fear is that code contributions are structured in a way that is easily legible, so is anything that happens on w.org, but we may miss including people who have contributed to the growth of WordPress in non-legible ways.

Samattical

Automattic, Events, New York, Open Source, Personal, Travel, Video, WordPress.com

Today is the day! The first day of my sabbatical. What an experience it has been. On Thursday I delivered my very first Ignite talk on the subject! Here it is.

The Ignite format is a tricky one as a speaker! I will do better next time. My friend Connie has delivered seven Ignite talks now and I thought hers and Adam Savage’s were the highlights of the ones I saw. (I didn’t see everything because I was popping in and out.)

Preparing for this sabbatical has been the most fun I’ve had working at Automattic, ever. It brought so much clarity to things, we’ve been able to resolve in hours things that have lingered for months, including two acquisitions, several hires, big strategies, and more.

After this talk I caught a redeye to NYC to meet with the WordPress.com leadership team and hand off my leadership there to Daniel Bachhuber.

It is a beautiful symmetry that the first-ever sabbatical taken at Automattic was by its CEO at the time, Toni Schneider, which gave me the opportunity to step in and try on being a CEO, and it’s an incredible gift that Toni is returning to be CEO of Automattic while I’m out for the months of February, March, and April.

What am I going to do with all this free time? Blog a ton. So follow along if you want to see this journey. I’m going to try to open source all the things. 😇

Update: I ended up extending this to May 15 since it got a late start.

Freedom Grants

Audrey, Censorship, Open Source, Politics

The Audrey Scholars program is still getting started, but I wanted to introduce another opportunity: Freedom grants. As the page says “If you are an open source contributor, and you feel your current political environment is incompatible with open source values, we would like to offer the opportunity for a grant to help you get set up in a new environment. Please state your case below.”

I’m not sure exactly how this will work, but we’ll figure it out together. The offer is out there. This is very much inspired by the work of the Oslo Freedom Forum.

Open Insulin

One of my big themes is that open source will transform every industry, with key examples being WordPress in web publishing, WooCommerce in online commerce, Wikipedia in reference, and Bitcoin/Ethereum in finance. Medicine, though, has been relatively unscathed so far. Here’s a great video introducing the Open Insulin project, which for the past 6 years has been developing their own method of manufacturing insulin and is going to open source its process to the world for anyone to recreate.

It also reminds me of the What If? article in the Economist a few days ago about mRNA self-biohacking. Hat tip: Riaan Knoetze.

Wix and Their Dirty Tricks

Open Source, Wikipedia, WordPress

Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it, has now decided the best way to gain relevance is attacking the open source WordPress community in a bizarre set of ads. They can’t even come up with original concepts for attack ads, and have tried to rip-off of Apple’s Mac vs PC ads, but tastelessly personify the WordPress community as an absent, drunken father in a therapy session. 🤔

I have a lot of empathy for whoever was forced to work on these ads, including the actors, it must have felt bad working on something that’s like Encyclopedia Britannica attacking Wikipedia. WordPress is a global movement of hundreds of thousands of volunteers and community members, coming together to make the web a better place. The code, and everything you put into it, belongs to you, and its open source license ensures that you’re in complete control, now and forever. WordPress is free, and also gives you freedom.

Wix is a for-profit company with a valuation that peaked at around 20 billion dollars, and whose business model is getting customers to pay more and more every year and making it difficult to leave or get a refund. (Don’t take my word for it, look at their investor presentations.) They are so insecure that they are also the only website creator I’m aware of that doesn’t allow you to export your content, so they’re like a roach motel where you can check in but never check out. Once you buy into their proprietary stack you’re locked in, which even their support documentation admits:

So if we’re comparing website builders to abusive relationships, Wix is one that locks you in the basement and doesn’t let you leave. I’m surprised consumer protection agencies haven’t gone after them.

Philosophically, I believe in open source, and if WordPress isn’t a good fit for you there are other great open source communities like Drupal, Joomla, Jekyll, and Typo3. We also have a great relationship with some of our proprietary competitors, and I have huge respect for the teams at Shopify and Squarespace, and even though we compete I’ve always seen them operate with integrity and I’d recommend them without hesitation.

I have to believe that users will care about that in the long run, and maybe that’s why Squarespace just passed up Wix in market share. They natively support exporting into WordPress’ format and don’t have to resort to dirty tricks to be successful. I expect Squarespace’s upcoming IPO will be a great one.

Wix, though, continues to show their true colors. Regardless of their product, I hope people consider the behavior of companies in the world they support with their dollars. Wix really wants you to see their new campaign though, so let’s take the bait and watch the creepy, misleading way they are trying to represent themselves.

The Web Turns 30

“Vague, but exciting.” Thirty years ago yesterday, Sir Tim Berners-Lee submitted his original proposal for an information management system to his boss at CERN — what would later become the World Wide Web (and, it turns out, a huge influence on my life and career).

To help celebrate, I tweeted WordPress’s contribution to the web’s grand timeline (above), and I got to participate in The Economist’s Babbage podcast looking back at the pioneers of the early web. Listen to the whole episode below:

https://soundcloud.com/theeconomist/babbage-pioneers-of-the-www

Journalism and Newspack

Automattic, Open Source, Press, Software, WordPress, WordPress.com, ,

WordPress.com is partnering with Google and news industry leaders on a new platform for small- and medium-sized publishers, called Newspack. The team has raised $2.4 million in first-year funding from the Google News Initiative, Lenfest Journalism Institute, Civil funder ConsenSys, and the Knight Foundation, among others. We’re also still happy to talk to and engage other funders who want to get involved — I’d love to put even more resources into this.

It’s been a difficult climate for the news business, particularly at the local level. It also breaks my heart how much of their limited resources these organizations still sink into closed-source or dead-end technology. Open source is clearly the future, and if we do this right Newspack can be the technology choice that lasts with them through the decades, and hopefully our 15 years of growth lends some credibility to our orientation to build things for the long term.

Here’s Kinsey in Nieman Lab:

The goal is to both make sure that the catalog of publishing tools as well as business tools they need to be able to run what one hopes is a sustainable news operation are addressed simultaneously. It’s not simply a CMS for a newsroom, but a full business system that enables publishing and monetization at the same time.

–Nieman Lab interview

As you have come to expect from Automattic, everything will be open source and developed to the same standards WordPress itself is. We’re working with Spirited Media and the News Revenue Hub on the platform, and we will likely look for even more partnership opportunities from across the WordPress ecosystem. If you’d like to invest or get involved, drop us a line at newspack@automattic.com.

Facebook Dropping Patent Clause

Facebook, Open Source, WordPress

I am surprised and excited to see the news that Facebook is going to drop the patent clause that I wrote about last week. They’ve announced that with React 16 the license will just be regular MIT with no patent addition. I applaud Facebook for making this move, and I hope that patent clause use is re-examined across all their open source projects.

Our decision to move away from React, based on their previous stance, has sparked a lot of interesting discussions in the WordPress world. Particularly with Gutenberg there may be an approach that allows developers to write Gutenberg blocks (Gutenblocks) in the library of their choice including Preact, Polymer, or Vue, and now React could be an officially-supported option as well.

I want to say thank you to everyone who participated in the discussion thus far, I really appreciate it. The vigorous debate and discussion in the comments here and on Hacker News and Reddit was great for the passion people brought and the opportunity to learn about so many different points of view; it was even better that Facebook was listening.

On React and WordPress

Facebook, Open Source

Big companies like to bury unpleasant news on Fridays: A few weeks ago, Facebook announced they have decided to dig in on their patent clause addition to the React license, even after Apache had said it’s no longer allowed for Apache.org projects. In their words, removing the patent clause would "increase the amount of time and money we have to spend fighting meritless lawsuits."

I'm not judging Facebook or saying they're wrong, it's not my place. They have decided it's right for them — it's their work and they can decide to license it however they wish. I appreciate that they've made their intentions going forward clear.

A few years ago, Automattic used React as the basis for the ground-up rewrite of WordPress.com we called Calypso, I believe it's one of the larger React-based open source projects. As our general counsel wrote, we made the decision that we'd never run into the patent issue. That is still true today as it was then, and overall, we’ve been really happy with React. More recently, the WordPress community started to use React for Gutenberg, the largest core project we've taken on in many years. People's experience with React and the size of the React community —  including Calypso — was a factor in trying out React for Gutenberg, and that made React the new de facto standard for WordPress and the tens of thousands of plugins written for WordPress.

We had a many-thousand word announcement talking about how great React is and how we're officially adopting it for WordPress, and encouraging plugins to do the same. I’ve been sitting on that post, hoping that the patent issue would be resolved in a way we were comfortable passing down to our users.

That post won't be published, and instead I'm here to say that the Gutenberg team is going to take a step back and rewrite Gutenberg using a different library. It will likely delay Gutenberg at least a few weeks, and may push the release into next year.

Automattic will also use whatever we choose for Gutenberg to rewrite Calypso — that will take a lot longer, and Automattic still has no issue with the patents clause, but the long-term consistency with core is worth more than a short-term hit to Automattic’s business from a rewrite. Core WordPress updates go out to over a quarter of all websites, having them all inherit the patents clause isn’t something I’m comfortable with.

I think Facebook’s clause is actually clearer than many other approaches companies could take, and Facebook has been one of the better open source contributors out there. But we have a lot of problems to tackle, and convincing the world that Facebook’s patent clause is fine isn’t ours to take on. It’s their fight.

The decision on which library to use going forward will be another post; it’ll be primarily a technical decision. We’ll look for something with most of the benefits of React, but without the baggage of a patents clause that’s confusing and threatening to many people. Thank you to everyone who took time to share their thoughts and give feedback on these issues thus far — we're always listening.

Update: This post received an incredible response from the wider web and open source community, and a few days later Facebook reversed their position.

The Wix Mobile App, a WordPress Joint

Design, Open Source, WordPress

Anyone who knows me knows that I like to try new things — phones, gadgets, apps. Last week I downloaded the new Wix (closed, proprietary, non-open-sourced, non-GPL) mobile app. I’m always interested to see how others tackle the challenge of building and editing websites from a mobile device.

I started playing around with the editor, and felt… déjà vu. It was familiar. Like I had used it before.

Turns out I had. Because it’s WordPress.

If I were being charitable, I’d say, “The app’s editor is based on the WordPress mobile app’s editor.” If I were being honest, I’d say that Wix copied WordPress without attribution, credit, or following the license. The custom icons, the class names, even the bugs. You can see the forked repositories on GitHub complete with original commits from Alex and Maxime, two developers on Automattic’s mobile team. Wix has always borrowed liberally from WordPress — including their company name, which used to be Wixpress Ltd. — but this blatant rip-off and code theft is beyond anything I’ve seen before from a competitor.

Dear Wix,

This explicitly contravenes the GPL, which requires attribution and a corresponding GPL license on whatever you release publicly built on top of GPL code. The GPL is what has allowed WordPress to flourish, and that let us create this code. Your app’s editor is built with stolen code, so your whole app is now in violation of the license.

I suppose we’ll take this as a compliment — I’m sure the hundreds of people who have contributed to WordPress Core and our mobile apps are flattered that you chose to build one of your company’s core features using our code. We’re also excited to see what great things you create with all the time you saved not having to write your own mobile editor.

You know what’d be even more exciting? To see you abide by the GPL and release your source code back to the community that gave you that jump start.

I’ve always said that the GPL isn’t about limits, it’s about possibilities. In open source software, you trade some of your control as a developer to better serve the developer community and the people using your sites and products. I don’t think that’s a limit, I think it’s a way to make sure we encourage innovation and momentum. If you want to close the door on innovation, Wix, that’s your decision to make — just write your own code. If you’re going to join the open source community, play by the open source rules.

Release your app under the GPL, and put the source code for your app up on GitHub so that we can all build on it, improve it, and learn from it.

Love,
Matt and the open source community

An Update

The CEO of Wix has posted a response on their blog. I’ll also try to post my response it to the comments there. Miriam Schwab also has a very good response.

We were all very surprised by your post, as you have so many claims against us.

Wow, dude I did not even know we were fighting.

It’s not a fight: the claim is that the Wix mobile apps distribute GPL code and aren’t themselves GPL, so they violate the license.

First, you say we have been taking from the open source community without giving back, well, of course, that isn’t true. Here is a list of 224 projects on our public GitHub page, and as you can see they are all dated before your post. We have not checked if WordPress is using them, but you are more than welcome to do so, some of them are pretty good.

Very glad your company has projects on GitHub! Thank you for the offer to use them; if we do, we’ll make sure to follow the license you’ve put on the code very carefully.

Releasing other open source projects doesn’t mean that you can violate the license of the editor code you distributed in your mobile apps. To repeat my earlier points: since you distributed GPL code with your apps, the entire apps need to be released at GPL, not just your modifications to that one library.

As this Hacker News comment put it, “Open source is not a swap meet; you can’t violate a license if you voluntarily release some other code to make up for it.”

We always shared and admired your commitment to give back, which is exactly why we have those 224 open source projects, and thousands more bugs/improvements available to the open source community and we will release the app you saw as well.

If you were to release the entire source code of the apps under GPL that would bring you back into compliance with the license you violated. I think you’re saying you will do that here, but can you clarify? When should we look for the app code to be released, and where? That would resolve this issue completely.

Next, you talk about the Wix App being stolen from WordPress. There are more than 3 million lines of code in the Wix application, notably the hotels/blogs/chat/eCommerce/scheduling/booking is all our code.

I said the app includes stolen code. It doesn’t matter if it’s 30 lines or 30 million lines: because it includes GPL code and you distributed the app, the entire thing needs to be GPL. If you release the entire app’s code, as I think you said you would, then that resolves the license violation.

Yes, we did use the WordPress open source library for a minor part of the application (that is the concept of open source right?), and everything we improved there or modified, we submitted back as open source, see here in this link – you should check it out, pretty cool way of using it on mobile native. I really think you guys can use it with your app (and it is open source, so you are welcome to use it for free). And, by the way, the part that we used was in fact developed by another and modified by you.

Thank you for admitting you used the code and not trying to hide it. The issue isn’t the changes you made, it’s that including the editor means you need to submit the entire app as open source, which you have not yet — it’s completely proprietary.

If you want to read the account from Tal Kol, one of the leading engineers on this project, here it is. He was really happy to share his side of the story.

I have seen it, and it already has a number of good comments on it, including this one: “Can you address this point made in Matt’s post: ‘This explicitly contravenes the GPL, which requires attribution and a corresponding GPL license on whatever you release publicly built on top of GPL code’.” It appears you and Tal might share a misunderstanding of how the GPL works — software licensing can be tricky and many people make honest mistakes. (If you want to get into serious detail, this comment lays the licensing requirements out clearly.) It is easy to rectify this one: release your apps as open source under the GPL.

Now, what is this thing about us stealing your branding? Our product was always called Wix and our website Wix.com, we never borrowed from your marketing or brand.

Sorry for including this distraction; I was referring specifically to the fact that Wix used to go by “Wixpress.” You can see this in your Form F-1, and there used to be a support page about this on your site:

Although that is still in Google, the page it links to now mysteriously returns a 404 error, which you may want to look into.

In fact, if I remember correctly, until recently the Automattic home page was all about blogs and only recently it has become “websites.” Also, your business model changed to almost exactly the one we had for years. Can it be that you guys are borrowing from us? If so, again, you are welcome to it.

The Automattic home page has been a series of haiku about our products since 2009, pretty much unchanged — I think you mean the WordPress.com home page here. WordPress has been used for creating websites, not just blogs, since our 1.5 release in 2005 added themes and pages. In my 2014 State of the Word address I talked about how 87% of WordPress sites use it as a CMS. We regularly test dozens of variations of the WP.com homepage and some of them definitely emphasize website creation. I will say we look to Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace as innovators in the space with products that reach many small businesses, and Wix especially should be commended for its success and growth as a public company.

If you believe that we need to give you credit, that you deserve credit, I must say, absolutely yes. You guys deserve a lot of credit, but not because of a few lines of source code, you deserve credit because you guys have been making the internet dramatically better, and for that we at Wix are big fans. We love what you have been trying to do, and are working very hard to add our own contribution to make the internet better.

Thank you very much, that is kind. I do think there are a lot of values we share in common and would love to see this one issue resolved.

If you need source code that we have, and we have not yet released, then, most likely we will be happy to share, you only need to ask. We share your belief that making the internet better, is best for everyone.

That’s what my post was asking, for you to release the code. To quote my original letter: “Release your app under the GPL, and put the source code for your app up on GitHub so that we can all build on it, improve it, and learn from it.”

Finally, during the last couple of years, I reached out a couple of times trying to meet with you. Could I do that again here? I believe in friendly competition, and as much fun as it is to chat over the blogosphere, maybe we can also do it over a cup of coffee?

Once this is resolved I’d be happy to meet up. I believe when we exchanged emails in 2014 there was trouble finding overlap in our travel schedules.

I hope the above clarifies where we think Wix made a mistake, and how to fix it.

The first-party premier Simplenote native apps for Android, iOS, and macOS are now fully open source. I’m very proud of the team for this, and excited that the broader Simplenote community can now see behind the scenes of how things are developing with the app, which remains one of my personal favorites across every platform. What’s Simplenote? It’s the easiest way to have your plain text notes synced instantly across every device and browser you use.