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Wordpress Founder Accuses Wix Of Stealing Code (ma.tt)
An anonymous reader writes:
"Wow, dude I did not even know we were fighting," Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami posted on the company's blog Saturday -- responding to Wordpress creator Matt Mullenweg, who on Friday accused Wix of stealing their code. "The claim is that the Wix mobile apps distribute GPL code and aren't themselves GPL, so they violate the license," Mullenweg wrote.
Abrahami argued that "Everything we improved there or modified, we submitted back as open source," adding "we will release the app you saw as well... " Mullenweg responded "It appears you and [lead engineer] Tal might share a misunderstanding of how the GPL works," ultimately adding "software licensing can be tricky and many people make honest mistakes."
Wix had also argued they're giving back to the open source community by listing 224 public projects on their GitHub page. "Thank you for the offer to use them," Mullenweg responded. "If we do, we'll make sure to follow the license you've put on the code very carefully."
Abrahami argued that "Everything we improved there or modified, we submitted back as open source," adding "we will release the app you saw as well... " Mullenweg responded "It appears you and [lead engineer] Tal might share a misunderstanding of how the GPL works," ultimately adding "software licensing can be tricky and many people make honest mistakes."
Wix had also argued they're giving back to the open source community by listing 224 public projects on their GitHub page. "Thank you for the offer to use them," Mullenweg responded. "If we do, we'll make sure to follow the license you've put on the code very carefully."
Mullenweg: your app uses GPL code so you have to obey the licence, which you're not doing.
Abrahami: OH WE LOVE OPEN SOURCE WE PUT STUFF ON GITHUB ALL THE TIME
what a prick
Apple, for example, have had to implement their own SMB stack as smbx, instead of using Samba. For a number of years, SMB compatibility and functionality took a huge step backwards on OS X, all because the Samba project started to use GPL v3. This ended up with developers who would have been working on patches and changes for Samba, instead working on their own closed-source implementation that, quite frankly, was nowhere near as good or as mature as Samba.
I asked a lead developer at Samba about this at the time (Tridge), and he said it was fine, Apple wasn't contributing very much anyway.
It was really Apple's loss (and their customers) in that case.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."