The WordPress Foundation Is Live!

WordPress, the popular, open-source CMS/blogging software loved the world around, has just welcomed another addition to its homonymous family.

WordPress founder and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg has just announced that his nonprofit, charitable foundation is officially an open shop. The WordPress Foundation is an organization dedicated to supporting and promoting the very mission of WordPress itself. Simply put, as on the Foundation website: "to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software." Everybody dance!

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And not just WordPress; the Foundation will protect WordCamp and all related entities. From the Foundation's brand new site:

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. As part of this mission, the Foundation will be responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks. A 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the WordPress Foundation will also pursue a charter to educate the public about WordPress and related open source software.

Citing the Mozilla Foundation and the creator of the GNU GPL license as inspirations, the Foundation says its philosophies to serve the public good will require all its projects to be utterly free - as in beer and as in speech.

So far, the Foundation's projects include WordPress, its plugins and themes, the forum software bbPress and social network software BuddyPress.

All projects of the WordPress Foundation will meet the following criteria:

• The software should be licensed under the GNU Public License.


• The software should be freely available to anyone to use for any purpose, and without permission.


• The software should be open to modifications.


• Any modifications should be freely distributable at no cost and without permission from its creators.


• The software should provide a framework for translation to make it globally accessible to speakers of all languages.


• The software should provide a framework for extensions so modifications and enhancements can be made without modifying core code.

The Foundation will be setting up a donation process within the next few days.

WordPress fans (and others), let us know what you think in the comments!

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