David Heinemeier Hansson, also known as DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails and the CEO of 37signals, owner of the Basecamp app, has voiced his opinion on the conflicting issues in the WordPress industry between Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, and WP Engine. He believes that Automattic is currently deviating from its original path.
DHH expresses concern that this problem may also harm other open-source communities. He highlights that the open-source community has flourished because anyone can build businesses based on open-source without any concerns, as long as they abide by the terms of service. However, it is unprecedented to demand an 8% share of profits for a successful project, which goes beyond the original agreement.
He suggests that Automattic may want WordPress to remain the most open-source project possible but simply aims to control competitors that may enter the market. Nonetheless, Automattic can potentially change the WordPress code in the future to move away from the GPL license, as demonstrated by the previous case of Redis. Moreover, the old code can still be forked into separate projects.
TLDR: David Heinemeier Hansson shares his views on the conflicts in the WordPress industry and expresses concerns about Automattic’s current direction impacting open-source communities beyond WordPress.
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