Doc’s WordPress News Drop is a weekly report on the most pressing WordPress news. When the news drops, I will pick it up and deliver it right to you.
Doc Pop’s News Drop
Here’s our short recap of the recent #wpdrama between WordPress and Wix. You can read more about it in our recent article here.
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Rivalries are nothing new in world of tech. Apple and IBM, Uber and Lyft, Spotify and every single musician out there. Even fun loving WordPress has had it’s share of headbutting over the years, most notably with The WordPress Helpers and Thesis.com
But it still came as a surprise last week when WordPress co-founder,Matt Mulenweg, took to the internet to rant about Wix, a closed blogging platform that started off 10 years ago as Wixpress.
According to Matt’s posts, Wix recently launched a new iPhone app that heavily used code from WordPress’s existing mobile app. The code was open source, but the complaint is that Wix used the code without following the GNU Public License and without providing any attribution to WordPress. Basically Matt’s saying “Wix stole our code“.
Wix co-founder, Avishai Abrahami, quickly fired back saying “Wow dude, I didn’t even know we were fighting.” Abrahami claimed that Wix has been active in the open source community, and he couldn’t see what Matt’s problem was, bro. He says that Wix did use WordPress code for just a teeny tiny part of their mobile app and that they made a separate open source project based on their improvements and modifications.
The enginer behind Wix’s iOS app chimed in on the controversy too, saying that he thought he followed the GPL and attributed WordPress correctly.
Either way, it may have been a better move for Wix to have quickly added attribution in their app and asked how else they could resolve the problem, but given the hostility of Matt’s initial attack, I can see why Wix got so defensive.
What are you thoughts on WordPress vs Wix? Did Wix steal the code? Are GPLs hard to understand? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Which reminds me, we’ve launched a new survey and we are looking to hear from WordPress business owners. If you make a living off of WordPress, please take 3 minutes to fill out our WordPress Industry Survey on TorqueMag.io. We’ll share the results in a future episode.
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