Comment by runjake
3 days ago
> He really hasn't advocated for much
Like him or hate him, he grew WordPress to be one of the most popular open source projects of all time. It seems fair to call him a key advocate.
WordPress is still GPL licensed.
3 days ago
> He really hasn't advocated for much
Like him or hate him, he grew WordPress to be one of the most popular open source projects of all time. It seems fair to call him a key advocate.
WordPress is still GPL licensed.
> WordPress is still GPL licensed.
Only because it's forced to be because it in turn was a fork of a previous GPL license.
It should be noted that Mullenweg has regularly weaponized the GPL license in the past - using it to take out other companies in the ecosystem like in their fight against Thesis.
How does one weaponize a gpl license in this context?
You make the CSS and branding into a thing that folks are "discouraged" from distributing. That's most of the WP plugin and theme ecosystem, or was when I retired from it.
Prevent anyone else from profiting off of the ecosystem.
Wordpress might technically be GPL, but the code itself routes most of the key features of Wordpress through Automattic.
If you have a massive technical moat around the ecosystem, it would make sense to be against erecting walls.
> Like him or hate him, he grew WordPress to be one of the most popular open source projects of all time. It seems fair to call him a key advocate.
As someone who has contributed to WordPress: WordPress grew on the back of volunteers.
It would be unfair to most non-Automattic "volunteers" if he was attributed all/most credit for what it had become, especially pre-Gutenberg.
I'm thankfully about 4 years out of making a living un-fucking WP sites but one of the strangest things about the ecosystem is about "for-sale" GPL software.
It's felt somewhat unique to WP for sure, though maybe there are other examples where swaths of communities get big mad when people suggest distributing GPL software for free. I found it a little repellent, but lots of folks scraped together micro-scale businesses selling plugins and themes.
I believe I made a lot better living building stuff for clients and then not caring about what they did with the software, but hey, I'm not the boss of folks trying to make a living supporting a $10 lifetime membership to an image size selecting plugin.
Anyhow, my point is that there is at least a little nuance to be found when thinking about WP and open source software.
The WRT54G community tried this for a while.
Red Hat most memorably has tried it with "technically you are legally permitted to distribute these things we are giving you under contract but we will terminate your contract if you do."
[dead]
LLMs will surely fix this ubiquitous position of WP very soon.
Doubtful. Code isn't what keeps OSS projects going: people do.
Claude can reproduce Wordpress with enough tokens. Claude cannot reproduce the community of maintainers, plug-in authors, users reporting bugs, etc. that is what any real user of Wordpress actually wants (if they don't want buggy, out of date software with security risks).
You don’t need them 99% of the time as these mods and plugins are effectively what WP lacks. For most trivial sites, and WP does lots of them, they can be promoted.
It is much easier to prompt a relatively tight slop doing the same that WP plus dozens of plugins does. Particularly if you know what you’re doing.
I think a large % of Wordpress usage is for simple websites that are better served by tools simpler than Wordpress. I'm not sure if you've tried to use Wordpress for a simple site. I did recently and it was a horrendous experience.
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LLMs are incredible tools if you are knowledgeable enough about what you want to spell out exactly what you want it to implement for you. The long tail of Wordpress users are, in my experience, not knowledgeable enough to come up with their own solution.