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They probably can't change the license for WordPress. It's under the GPL and it looks like WordPress doesn't require a contributor agreement assigning copyright
by mdasen 2y ago
They probably can't change the license for WordPress. It's under the GPL and it looks like WordPress doesn't require a contributor agreement assigning copyright to someone else. They'd need to get every contributor to agree to relicense it.
There's also the question of who would relicense it. Automattic doesn't own the WordPress trademarks and if there were a contributor agreement, it would likely be assigning the code to the WordPress Foundation, not Automattic.
The WordPress Foundation non-profit doesn't have a good incentive to put a restrictive license on it. Part of the problem is that the WordPress Foundation doesn't seem to be truly independent of the for-profit Automattic. The point of creating a non-profit to hold the IP of an open source project is to prevent stuff like this from happening.
- chuckadams 2y ago> Automattic doesn't own the WordPress trademarks Actually, they own an exclusive license to the commercial exploitation of the WordPress trademark, including sublicensing rights. Given to them for free by the WordPress Foundation. The licensing rights could mean millions for the foundation, but it's all funneled straight to Automattic. Yep, truly independent foundation.
- FireBeyond 2y agoThe Foundation has three board members, a non-active retired coder, Matt Mullenweg and, perhaps surprising given all the venom that he has spat about the evils of Private Equity leeching from free software and open source, the Managing Partner of a Private Equity firm....
- ValentineC 2y ago> They probably can't change the license for WordPress. It's under the GPL and it looks like WordPress doesn't require a contributor agreement assigning copyright to someone else. They'd need to get every contributor to agree to relicense it. Not just every WordPress contributor, but every b2/cafelog contributor pre-fork too, since WordPress is a fork of b2/cafelog in the first place: https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-blogging-software-dilemma/ https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-blogging-software-dil...
- evanelias 2y agoThat's assuming any original b2/cafelog code is still present two decades after forking, which may not be the case. If that code was all entirely rewritten and replaced by now, and no original b2/cafelog code remains in the WordPress codebase, then I would expect that modern WordPress is unaffected by the original b2/cafelog copyright and license. But I am not a lawyer.