WordPress-Editor-iOS

The WordPress project lead Matt Mullenweg and the Wix company have been duking it it out on the GPL licensing of Wix's iOS application. It's now clear that Wix needs to release the source for the app - and they've said they will. What makes this peculiar is that according to Mullenweg they're stealing WordPress created code in it's whole. But if you look at the disputed iOS editor component (https://github.com/wordpress-mobile/WordPress-Editor-iOS), it's largely a derivative work. Automattic has taken five permissive licensed (BSD, MIT) libraries and built their component with those and are trying to take credit for creating it all largely. On the code page they've got attributions, because they have to. In the rage posts of Mullenweg there is no reference to these. Only the WordPress community and their doings. The feeling that WordPress

That's a good reason to include license terms in each file. I don't think that Wordpress people were malicious here. The LICENSE file usually contains the global licensing terms (as seen in many GNU projects). Each source file should still contain the license or a mention of the license. MIT-like licenses are usually put verbatim in each files, while verbose licenses like GPL just get a pointer to the LICENSE file. On some files, the MIT license is correctly present at the top of the file: https://github.com/wordpress-mobile/WordPress-Editor-iOS/blo...

Actually, the LICENSE file is for their project (which amusingly, he seems to have gone from the original GPLv2 to MIT a year earlier: https://github.com/wordpress-mobile/WordPress-Editor-iOS/com...). Even at that time, the source code included from the other project seems to have the embedded MIT license notice (e.g. https://github.com/wordpress-mobile/WordPress-Editor-iOS/blo...). And in the README.md they have attribution, mentioning the licenses of the underlying dependencies. tl;dr: The LICENSE file is for this project, not the underlying libraries they copy-pasted in (which other than say the png files, seem to have their MIT/BSD info in them).

Yes, that is exactly what they did: https://github.com/wordpress-mobile/WordPress-Editor-iOS/com...

From the lead developer: https://medium.com/@talkol/how-i-found-myself-accused-of-ste... > I know some developers are scared of using GPL, apparently for a pretty good reason. The WordPress GPL Rich Text component in question, is actually a wrapper around another Rich Text component named ZSSRichTextEditor which is licensed MIT. In retrospect it would have been easier to use it directly. https://github.com/nnhubbard/ZSSRichTextEditor https://github.com/wordpress-mobile/WordPress-Editor-iOS So, Wix built a wrapper for a GPL piece of code, which was just a wrapper for a MIT piece of code. According to this tweet[0], the only thing Wix needs to do is to assign a GPL license to their code...but alas IANAL. [0] - https://twitter.com/nitrogen/status/792486850845773824 EDIT - From the OP's blog: > When you embed and use GPL code, you have to rel

This response still doesn't address the core issue: The Wix mobile App uses GPL code but the rest of the source code of the app has not been made public so far as required by the GPL. At least they missed to add a written offer to distribute the source code. If they will publish the source if someone requests it has to be seen. When it comes to attribution it gets more difficult. As far as I understand the code from Wordpress is under plain vanilla GPL 2 without any supplements [1], so attribution is not required. [1] https://github.com/wordpress-mobile/WordPress-Editor-iOS/blo... EDIT: If anything, this whole controversy shows one thing: Open source licenses (particularly the GPL) are still not widely understood. (I assume ignorance on WIX's side).

I'm not someone who'd know enough to be able to discuss this in detail. But in the linked post, Kal Tol mentions "The WordPress GPL Rich Text component in question, is actually a wrapper around another Rich Text component named ZSSRichTextEditor which is licensed MIT. In retrospect it would have been easier to use it directly." So it appears that although Wordpress is using GPL, the component that Wordpress based their wrapper on is using a MIT license; so it would seem there is a flexibility in being able to use either the GPL or MIT license. What I'm basically seeing based on Kol's article is: 1. MIT created ZSSRichTextEditor, and distributed it using MIT license. (see: https://github.com/nnhubbard/ZSSRichTextEditor/blob/master/L...) 2. Wordpress then created a wrapper for ZSSRichTextEditor, and subsequently had it covered by GPL inst