Aims to protect and promote WordPress and other open-source projects

Jan 22, 2010 16:30 GMT  ·  By
The WordPress Foundation aims to protect and promote WordPress and other open-source projects
   The WordPress Foundation aims to protect and promote WordPress and other open-source projects

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform in the world and is used by millions of people and organizations, from regular users keeping a blog for friends and families to some of the biggest news blogs in the world with millions of monthly visitors each. WordPress.com is one of the biggest blog-hosting services in the world and is doing quite well financially, despite the fact that the software behind it is free and openly available to anyone. Automattic, the company behind WordPress, managed to thrive from giving away its main product and now it's taking a step further by setting the non-profit WordPress Foundation to further delegate responsibilities of the blogging software ensuring its future.

"The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software," the newly created site reads.

"The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come," it adds.

Right now, the WordPress Foundation has taken under its wing WordPress, WordCamp, the forum software bbPress and BuddyPress, the social-network software. All these and future projects hosted by the foundation are released under GPL (General Public License) and protecting and helping open-source software is its main focus.

The WordPress Foundation lists several inspirations like the Free Software Foundation, Open Source Applications Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation with which it actually shares quite a few traits. What does this mean for the future of WordPress? Well, at least in the short term, not very much. The blogging platform is improved by a big number of contributors around the world but the bulk of the work still comes from Automattic, Matt Mullenweg's company and this isn't going to change any time soon.