You know what? How about we discuss the tone of Matt's blog post too.
>I started playing around with the editor, and felt… déjà vu. It was familiar. Like I had used it before. Turns out I had. Because it’s WordPress.
No, it's only one open source library. Claiming an app is wordpress because it uses a shared library is like claiming Postgres and Apache webserver are the same because they both use libc. There's also a subtle claim of brand infringement here.
>If I were being charitable, I’d say, “The app’s editor is based on the WordPress mobile app’s editor.” If I were being honest, I’d say that Wix copied WordPress without attribution, credit, or following the license.
Not quite. Wix has given attribution and credit on their Github page. They have only failed to comply with the license terms.
>You can see the forked repositories on GitHub complete with original commits from Alex and Maxime, two developers on Automattic’s mobile team
Yes, that's called a git submodule with proper credit and attribution. If the commits were somehow rewritten to omit the author's information, THAT would have been a grave offence. Wix' publishing of the (partial) derivative work at the very least indication this was due to ignorance and not foul play. Yet Matt follows on with:
>Wix has always borrowed liberally from WordPress — including their company name, which used to be Wixpress Ltd. — but this blatant rip-off and code theft is beyond anything I’ve seen before from a competitor
Let's bring up an unrelated matter (which is debatable at best and irrelevant to software licensing) AND imply the whole thing was intentional and with malice. Not that it stopped Matt from using the "I could have gone to legal but maybe it was an honest mistake" argument in the comments later on. Note the use of the word "competitor".
What we're seeing here is not a license dispute. It's a quarrel between rival CEOs. If Matt really cared about compliance with GPL rather than bashing Wix he could have simply published a blog post saying "Hey Wix, I think you made a licensing mistake, how about you rectify it", or perhaps send an email to that effect - that would have been the honorable thing to do.
>I started playing around with the editor, and felt… déjà vu. It was familiar. Like I had used it before. Turns out I had. Because it’s WordPress.
No, it's only one open source library. Claiming an app is wordpress because it uses a shared library is like claiming Postgres and Apache webserver are the same because they both use libc. There's also a subtle claim of brand infringement here.
>If I were being charitable, I’d say, “The app’s editor is based on the WordPress mobile app’s editor.” If I were being honest, I’d say that Wix copied WordPress without attribution, credit, or following the license.
Not quite. Wix has given attribution and credit on their Github page. They have only failed to comply with the license terms.
>You can see the forked repositories on GitHub complete with original commits from Alex and Maxime, two developers on Automattic’s mobile team
Yes, that's called a git submodule with proper credit and attribution. If the commits were somehow rewritten to omit the author's information, THAT would have been a grave offence. Wix' publishing of the (partial) derivative work at the very least indication this was due to ignorance and not foul play. Yet Matt follows on with:
>Wix has always borrowed liberally from WordPress — including their company name, which used to be Wixpress Ltd. — but this blatant rip-off and code theft is beyond anything I’ve seen before from a competitor
Let's bring up an unrelated matter (which is debatable at best and irrelevant to software licensing) AND imply the whole thing was intentional and with malice. Not that it stopped Matt from using the "I could have gone to legal but maybe it was an honest mistake" argument in the comments later on. Note the use of the word "competitor".
What we're seeing here is not a license dispute. It's a quarrel between rival CEOs. If Matt really cared about compliance with GPL rather than bashing Wix he could have simply published a blog post saying "Hey Wix, I think you made a licensing mistake, how about you rectify it", or perhaps send an email to that effect - that would have been the honorable thing to do.