ROBERT JACOBI

Industry Analyst & Strategist

Who Owns WordPress

I’ve spent this last fews week thinking on how to reimagine #MorningCofee while keeping the daily briefing. The new Morning Coffee will cover a single topic per day with extended thoughts around one of the links. I hope this provides a bit more value and definitely more order around what’s in the daily. Monday through Friday will be the same and then a recap on the weekend. Enjoy and feel free to let me know how the change is working for you on Twitter.

BigScoots: Personal. Expert. Always There. That’s Real Managed Hosting.

Who Owns WordPress?

Today’s post is all about WordPress and a great article by rtCamp, “Who Owns WordPress?” I’ll cut the the politically correct answer provided by rtCamp.

In short, nobody and everybody. And that’s a great thing, not just for the millions of individuals in the global WordPress community, but also for business at any scale.

While this is correct on the face of it and a truth most people adhere to, the matter is a bit more simple and complicated. There are two WordPress that most people think of .org and .com. WordPress.org is first and foremost owned by WordPress Foundation. Policies at the foundation strictly maintain WordPress, WordCamp, and other intellectual property. I can’t just start WordPress.totallynewdomain without permission. Also, I can’t fork the code and call it WordPressWP but I can make WPWP as either a private or public project. Back to the nitty-gritty, the foundation is a United States 501(c)3 non-profit organization and has a subsidiary, WordPress Community Support, PBC which is a B-corp. The B-corp is used as a financial funnel. WordPress.com is owned by Automattic, Inc. and in this regard is a completely different beast. So while the spirit is that nobody and everybody own WordPress, some people really do own it but not like owning a candy bar.

And now the rest of the best …

(Extra Time Media) WordPress 5.5: These changes are coming in August

(cPanel) How To Use WordPress as a Headless CMS

(Torque) Maximize Your WordPress Memberships Site Using Automated Emails

(WP Tavern) WordPress Documentation Team Bans Links to Commercial Websites

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