The WordPress Blog came out with some good news for the Open source and GPL community. Matt Mullenweg has officially started out the WordPress Foundation, a charitable organization to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.
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. As part of this mission, the Foundation will be responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks. A 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the WordPress Foundation will also pursue a charter to educate the public about WordPress and related open source software.
To learn more about the WordPress Foundation, visit the official site.
This is great news. But there are many questions. I suppose in time they will be answered.
yeah, but its still great news. I wish everything on the net was open source. not that I mind paying for some things, like plugins for instance, but those of us who are unemployed can’t afford the cool things our users want, we just do the best we can with what we got.
It’s cerainly a positive development, but imho, some of the Projects Page may need re-wording.
The way it reads now, it kind of seems that The WordPres Foundation and its “volunteers” are responsible for the creation/development of all of the plugins and themes on WordPress.org — not individual designers and developers who contributed their work to the community.
I know that’s definitely not what they meant to say — and it’s certainly not the way WP thinks, but it could be worded a wee bit better. I guess it’s basically a case of semantics.
The foundation will be the legal entity that retains trademark rights for WordPress and WordCamp going forward. So if Matt meets an untimely demise on his next trip to a hunting lodge in Botswana or crossing the street in Amsterdam, everyone in the Open Source community will continue to have access to WP with no changes. And the semantics will have to be reworked over time to get it just right like people have already commented. I’m sure they did not mean that plugin developers should be volunteers working for free. They support Open Source and everything else Open Source. So if you make something like a premium theme that does not support open source but instead violates the spirit of open source, I wonder if this means the new Foundation will not support your product. There are lots of theme makers that support open source and still make a buck by selling support so who knows… this new Foundation for sure is meant to guarantee the Open Source community that their development work will remain free.