<story><title>Dear Matt Mullenweg: An Open Letter from Wix.com’s CEO Avishai Abrahami</title><url>http://www.wix.com/blog/2016/10/dear-matt-mullenweg-an-open-letter-from-wix-coms-ceo-avishai-abrahami/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pavlov</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Yes, we did use 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 ...&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That is not the concept of the GPL though. They need to release the source for the entire derived work, not just that one component. It&amp;#x27;s not Wix&amp;#x27;s choice -- it&amp;#x27;s required by the license, and the act of incorporating code under that license makes them bound by it.&lt;p&gt;For a letter written by a CEO, this one seems strangely oblivious to the real issues. Did he run it through the legal department at all? (Presumably not, since it&amp;#x27;s the weekend.)&lt;p&gt;Abrahami writes: &amp;quot;If you believe that we need to give you credit&amp;quot; -- but that&amp;#x27;s not the issue at hand. It gives the impression that he doesn&amp;#x27;t understand the differences between open source licenses, and that can be a serious liability for a company that builds so heavily on other people&amp;#x27;s code.&lt;p&gt;[Edit] I actually wish the GPL were finally tested in court, because that would resolve a long-standing question around its enforceability. The CEO of Wix admitted that the derived work in this case contains &amp;quot;more than 3 million lines of code&amp;quot;... The copyright owner of the GPL&amp;#x27;d module could sue them to have all that released under the GPL, and (assuming Wix wouldn&amp;#x27;t comply) then we would finally know if the license holds up in court or not.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tzs</author><text>&amp;gt; The CEO of Wix admitted that the derived work in this case contains &amp;quot;more than 3 million lines of code&amp;quot;... The copyright owner of the GPL&amp;#x27;d module could sue them to have all that released under the GPL, and (assuming Wix wouldn&amp;#x27;t comply) then we would finally know if the license holds up in court or not.&lt;p&gt;The copyright owner would win, but all they would likely get out of the court is an injunction stopping Wix from distributing the infringing product and monetary damages. They would probably not be able to force Wix to release source code.&lt;p&gt;If the GPL code is just a wrapper around MIT licensed code, as has been claimed, Wix should be able to quickly change their code to use that MIT code directly instead of using WordPress&amp;#x27; GPL wrapper.</text></comment>
<story><title>Dear Matt Mullenweg: An Open Letter from Wix.com’s CEO Avishai Abrahami</title><url>http://www.wix.com/blog/2016/10/dear-matt-mullenweg-an-open-letter-from-wix-coms-ceo-avishai-abrahami/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pavlov</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Yes, we did use 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 ...&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That is not the concept of the GPL though. They need to release the source for the entire derived work, not just that one component. It&amp;#x27;s not Wix&amp;#x27;s choice -- it&amp;#x27;s required by the license, and the act of incorporating code under that license makes them bound by it.&lt;p&gt;For a letter written by a CEO, this one seems strangely oblivious to the real issues. Did he run it through the legal department at all? (Presumably not, since it&amp;#x27;s the weekend.)&lt;p&gt;Abrahami writes: &amp;quot;If you believe that we need to give you credit&amp;quot; -- but that&amp;#x27;s not the issue at hand. It gives the impression that he doesn&amp;#x27;t understand the differences between open source licenses, and that can be a serious liability for a company that builds so heavily on other people&amp;#x27;s code.&lt;p&gt;[Edit] I actually wish the GPL were finally tested in court, because that would resolve a long-standing question around its enforceability. The CEO of Wix admitted that the derived work in this case contains &amp;quot;more than 3 million lines of code&amp;quot;... The copyright owner of the GPL&amp;#x27;d module could sue them to have all that released under the GPL, and (assuming Wix wouldn&amp;#x27;t comply) then we would finally know if the license holds up in court or not.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>caseysoftware</author><text>No, they could sue to bring them &lt;i&gt;in compliance with the license&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;ONE&lt;/i&gt; of the options to be in compliance may be to release the entire project GPL.&lt;p&gt;Another option may be to simply remove the offending code.&lt;p&gt;And the losing side (or settlement) may include attorney&amp;#x27;s fees.&lt;p&gt;There is no clause to the GPL that says &amp;quot;if you break our license even once, we get your project!&amp;quot;</text></comment>