In an earlier post I gave my take on why Matt Mullenweg is spot on in his criticism of Dan Jalkut’s criticism of the GPL. Shortly after Matt’s post, John Gruber of Daring Fireball chimed in with his thoughts. First he quotes Matt, which I reproduce in entirety below (to be clear, this is Matt’s text):
- I’ve never encountered a serious client who chose not to use WordPress because it was GPL-licensed, and I think it’s hard to argue that WordPress’s license has had a dampening effect on its adoption, given its success over competitors with widely varying licenses.
- I think we have an incredibly strong third-party extension, plugin, and theme community that has flourished, not in spite of the GPL license, but because of it.
- I’ve seen the absence of GPL in practice; there have been times in the WordPress world when parts of the community have “gone dark” and claimed their code was under more restrictive licenses, like used to be common with themes. Every time this cycle starts it basically kills innovation in that part of the WordPress world until people start opening up their code again or until a GPL equivalent is available. I’ve seen this firsthand several times now.
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