Doc Pop’s News Drop: Wix update

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.

Here’s a quick follow up to our WordPress Vs Wix episode from October. Since then, Wix has updated their mobile app to use an EMIT licensed code (in place of the previous WordPress code).

Love WordPress news, but hate reading? This is Doc Pop’s News Drop.

Back in October we talked about the time that Matt Mullenweg came out swinging at Wix.com, a WordPress competitor.

“According to Matt’s post, Wix launched a new iPhone app that heavily used code from WordPress’s existing mobile app. That code was open source, but the complaint was that Wix failed to use the proper GNU license. ”

In response to Matt’s accusation, the developer behind Wix’s mobile app claimed that WordPress’s code is actually just a wrapper around another Rich Text component named ZSSRichTextEditor which is licensed MIT. Stating further:

“In retrospect it would have been easier to [the MIT code] directly.”

It’s a little weird to share that on a Medium page instead of a Wix page, right?

Anyways, 3 months have passed and now there’s a new Wix app update. Unsurprisingly, Wix decided to ditch the WordPress code completely, choosing instead to fork straight from the ZSSrichtexteditor code.

This new Wix app update uses an Enhanced MIT license and no longer steps on WordPress’s GPL. Which is probably a good move.

I’d love to know what you think, is it a big risk to use any code from a competitor’s GPL or was Wix just doing something stupid and got caught? Please let us know in the comments.

Speaking of comments, last week we shared a News Drop about recent changes at Medium, and I really liked Dylan Robertson idea that due to Medium’s small size, it would be much easier for them to pivot and try new ideas that could benefit bloggers.

That’t it for this week’s News Drop, we’ll see you next week.