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Wordpress and self-hosting.
(feddit.org)
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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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Have the same question. It seems to be open source but if they wanted to they could make it closed source for sure..
They cannot make WordPress closed source because it’s released under the GPL, which means that any closed implementation cannot use this code.
With that said, the linked article is about access to wordpress.org, which is different from the source code of the project. I’m not entirely sure what this is about.
It's like Nestle taking water and selling it for profit. Except, this watering hole was built and maintained by everyone. Now, we all have to do more work to build and maintain, so Nestle can take more water. Matt, the guy who kinda invited everyone to the watering hole, is like "they gotta help maintain this watering hole, obviously!"
This is basically about the infrastructure for plugin update checks and similar centralized services.
They can, but only if all contributors agree or their work is removed entirely, and only future releases (code released prior to that is still GPL).
I don't know what the governance setup is like, but in theory the owners of the project can change the license to whatever they like at any time.
The catch is that this doesn't affect old versions, which remain available under the old license. So they could make WP closed-source or make the license more restrictive, but WP-engine or any portion of the community could make a fork and maintain the open source version from there. It wouldn't have the features added by the mainline WP project since the license change (and they'd likely have to change the branding), but that's about all that would be lost.
Similar things have happened in the past: see OpenOffice becoming LibreOffice for example.
Nah wordpress would instantly die if it went closed source. So many businesses only function the way they do because wordpress is easily customizable.
It would just get forked by some big webhosting company.