New Article Explains How the GPL Came About and WordPress Having Copyleft Obligations
Background readings: (with a focus on Matt Mullenweg; he has long blogged about why he preferred if not loved the GPL, which let him turn the French "b2" into great wealth and influence over the Web)
- Matt Mullenweg: WordPress and the GPL
- Mullenweg and Pearson Square Off on Patents, GPL, and Trademarks
- Matt Mullenweg’s stand for the GPL against Wix
- WordPress daddy Matt Mullenweg says Wix.com 'explicitly contravenes the GPL'
Yesterday Gen Daniel published an article about the "WordPress GPL License", but I cannot tell for sure if it's a real person (is "gen daniel" a reference to "genAI"?). Nevertheless, the following text seems mostly correct based on what I know and it's only a day old:
GPL is the license that free software and open source projects use to entirely pass the reality of openness. It was developed by Richard Stallman in 1989 after which he passed through the pain of closed source application.According to Richard, he encountered a nightmare when their new printer failed to give him access to modify its infrastructure because it was licensed under a private license.
Richard worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), specifically at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in the 1970s and early 1980s. This is where he discovered the danger of closed-source applications.
In contrast to the new printer, the older one at MIT came with source code that Richard and other programmers could freely access and modify. This meant that when the printer misbehaved or lacked a feature—like notifying users when a paper jam occurred—Richard could simply dive into the code and fix it. He even customized the printer to send alerts to nearby users whenever it got stuck, making it easier for someone to respond and fix the issue quickly.
However, when MIT replaced the old printer with a newer model from Xerox, things changed. Despite his request, Richard was denied access to its source code. The printer was now governed by a proprietary license, meaning that only the company could modify or share its code. This restriction made it impossible for Richard to apply the same useful changes he had previously made.
To him, it was more than just a technical inconvenience — it was a violation of the spirit of collaboration and freedom that had driven software innovation at MIT. This moment became a turning point and a deep source of frustration. It helped crystallize his mission to fight against the growing wave of proprietary software.
To cut it short, Richard started writing a license agreement that would allow anyone to use software as they see fit with no limit at all.
His attempt became successful and the GPL License was formed.
He initially used the license for the GNU operating system which he co-founded—which is why GNU always follows the GPL.
There are slight inaccuracies there, based on what I read in very reliable (high level of familiarity) sources, but it's close enough and based on the images used there (and the attributions accompanying these) it did seem to have involved a fair amount of "manual" (not LLM slop) work. Maybe 'he' used slop for only some certain bits, not all.
I left WordPress (where I had been heavily involved) around the time Automattic was formed. That alone says a lot. I don't want to elaborate further as I don't view Automattic as malicious. I just lost interest.
Since a friend has asked me to at least include a bit of a summary about how much / how long / how early I have worked on WordPress, let me just say that it started in 2004 when I set up my blog and did the same (same year) for my dear friend Harvey, who blogged in WordPress until he died in 2023. I spent a lot of time in the mailing lists (I was the person responsible for mailing lists' statistics for many years), I helped as much as I could in the official WordPress support forums (nobody compensated me for the effort), and I did all sorts of other things. I am one of the very first users of wordpress.com (probably the first ten) because I helped test it. Matt made an account there for me.
I hope that the GPL will keep Matt (the 'matt' in Automattic) fair and decent.
As I already explained in past articles (mostly in 2024), Automattic isn't the "bad party" here. It's being defensive.
"Richard" (as the above calls him) will be speaking about LLM slop [1, 2] less than an hour not far from where my wife and I live. His hosts want him to focus on "AI", so it is almost guaranteed that he will rant that many things which the media calls "AI" aren't intelligent at all, they're stochastic parrots and sometimes plagiarism.
If you live near Oxford and you read this, then it's not too late for you to go see him. It's free to attend. He likes big crowds. █