Matt Mullenweg, the man behind the popular WordPress open source content management system, has accused the people behind the Wix mobile app of stealing code from his software.
WordPress is released under the GNU General Public Licence version 2. The terms of the licence are that code released under it can be taken, modified and freely used. However, if the modified code is distributed or sold, then the code for the new creation has to be released in toto.
Mullenweg accused Wix — which he described as a closed, proprietary, non-open-sourced, non-GPL app — of having taken the code for its editor from WordPress.
"If I were being charitable, I’d say, 'The app’s editor is based on the WordPress mobile app’s editor'. If I were being honest, I’d say that Wix copied WordPress without attribution, credit, or following the licence," Mullenweg wrote.
{loadposition sam08}"The custom icons, the class names, even the bugs. You can see the forked repositories on GitHub complete with original commits from Alex and Maxime, two developers on Automattic’s mobile team.
"Wix has always borrowed liberally from WordPress — including their company name, which used to be Wixpress Ltd. — but this blatant rip-off and code theft is beyond anything I’ve seen before from a competitor."
In a response, Wix chief executive Avishai Abrahami did not directly address what Mullenweg had accused him and his company of doing.
Abrahami wrote that he had used the "WordPress open source library for a minor part of the application (that is the concept of open source right?), and everything we improved there or modified, we submitted back as open source".
He seemed unaware that if he had incorporated GPL code into an application, then the code for the entire application would have to be released as GPL in the event that the freshly created app was distributed or sold.
As Mullenweg responded: "Releasing other random open source projects doesn’t mean that you can violate the license of the editor code you distributed in your mobile apps. To repeat my earlier points: since you distributed GPL code with your apps, the entire apps need to be released at GPL, not just your modifications to that one library."