Comment by mschuster91
7 hours ago
> WordPress is free and open source software, developed under reciprocal licensing (GPL). Hosting companies are neither legally nor morally obligated to contribute back to WordPress core.
Many an old open-source project ran into this trap. Elasticsearch is one good example. Back when the old GPL era open-source projects were invented, the idea of third parties taking open-source software and just making a shitload of money with it was unthought of - and certainly not at the scale of Amazon AWS.
The only counterexample was Wikipedia's MediaWiki, it similarly is GPL but from the start it was clear that there would be at least one commercial side actor - Wikia, nowadays called Fandom.
Jimmy Wales is the co-founder and president of Fandom, so I think it’s in a pretty similar position to WP.com in that regard.
Wow I did not know that.
Now I have no idea which metaphorical box to sort him into because I am not sure why I should be shocked.