Learn About WordPress

WordPress Foundation Formed

501C NonProfit Organization

Matt Mullenweg and several Automattic employees have started a new 501C NPO to house various trademarks for WordPress and WordCamp. I think that’s the right choice for a project like this that was started by a couple coders writing for the Open Source community and wanting to remain so. Foundations and Associations de-personalize open source projects legally. No matter what happens down the road in terms of disputes or in fact if the original licensees unexpectedly die, the Foundation is in theory unaffected.

Life is Expensive

The main apparatus for much of the WordPress dominion is the aforementioned  San Francisco based corporation called Automattic. The free and popular wordpress.com and Gravitar and the new VideoPress all are Automattic products. Starting with a single hand full of employees 4 1/2 years ago, Automattic is now a company of 40 or more and they actually live all over the planet physically. To run a huge project like wordpress.com required full time employees and support and it could not have been done without forming a corporation… because life is expensive and so is running wordpress.com. The code behind WordPress continues to be Open Source and free for the world’s use although part of the apparatus is a commercial operation. And I think that’s appropriate and actually honorable in this day and age.

Time Flies and Then You Die

Before 1993 as a Technical Officer in a Fortune 100 Wall Street firm, my internet use was mostly done with a dialup company called CompuServe. We used primitive tools that were called “Gopher” and “Finger” and “FTP” to access file systems at Purdue University and other edu’s and government repositories. We also used it for file sharing because email systems were very limited with the file size capacity of their attachments. It cost a shocking 30 bucks an hour to “go online” in the late 80’s with CompuServe and by the early 90’s it was still around 5 bucks an hour for full featured service although personal accounts could be had for 10 bucks a month.

In 1993 the first practical “WWW” tool appeared. It was called Mosaic and it made CompuServe immediately obsolete because cheap online access companies could now form using friendly web browsers to “surf the net”. It was developed and paid for paid for by the US Government and freely available to download and use. Except the 2 guys that were paid using US Taxpayer money to write the code also did something sneaky that the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) did not anticipate. They retained legal rights to the code. And they became very wealthy by forming a company called NetScape and they sold cheap dialup online access and the browser commercially. The NCSA originally sued the developers they had paid to write the code but they were unsuccessful – and I think it’s because they did not force the programmers to sign a non-compete agreement but I’m not 100% sure. What is for sure is that the code paid for by you and me went into forming Netscape and it helped initiate or at least propel the DOT COM Bubble. NCSA was then more or less forced to sell all commercial rights to Mosaic in 1994 to another company and it became the so called Microsoft “Internet Explorer”. Microsoft IE became the most popular browser in the world for many years because of unfair trading practices.

The DOT COM Bubble Giveth and the DOT COM bubble Taketh Away

and so Netscape became a flash in the pan. It was purchased for a hugely over inflated price by AOL and then it died when the bubble burst taking down most of AOL and the support for Netscape commercially. What started as Mosaic, then became Netscape, finally morphed into an Open Source project we all know and love – Mozilla Firefox. In 2009 FireFox became the #1 browser in the world because it was clearly a better product than IE in terms of reliability and additional addon tools available – all for free – all Open Source at this point.

Remaining Open Source

WordPress could have gone the same route at a couple strategic points but it never did because Matt Mullenweg stayed true to the original Open Source ideals. And the world is better for it because WP is free to distribute and use. To make sure WordPress stays free and Open Source, this new Foundation will retain the trademarks anyway for now and we will just have to see what’s next. I do hope Matt has realized financial gain along with the huge thanks he deserves from literally millions of users and developers who use and support WordPress.

At a later time I’ll explain my dislike for WordPress Theme developers who violate the spirit of Open Source for their own personal profit. They take the WordPress code written for free by many people and they sell a product on top of it that cannot exist without WordPress by using slick marketing techniques . They do it for their own personal profit without making the products free to use the way it was intended by the Open Source developers. I hope the WordPress Foundation takes them on legally. There are superior Themes written that are Open Source of course, and their developers profit financially by selling premium support. For my commercial rollouts I use only Open Source Themes that sell support, and I use free Themes. I experiment with and do personal sites sometimes with themes that are not open source just to see what they’ve got that will “push the envelope” for developers. We will just have to wait an see what happens to the rogue for profit only theme makers. I hope they all get on stage with their lawyers in the front row at the next WordCamp SF.

Cheers -