neilperetz

Hi mthoms. The question you asked is: "how can The Foundation grant wordpress.org a license if the licence granted to Automattic is exclusive? Wordpress.org as you know, is not a non-profit."

One need not be a non-profit corporation to engage in non-commercial use. Distributing open source software at no charge is not a commercial activity.

An analogy might be you or I volunteering at a community event. We are individuals, not non-profit corporations, however we would be engaged in non-commmercial activity.

Sorry that even attorneys can have typos.

You wrote: "In explaining how the license agreement between the foundation and Automattic happened, the post says that 'In order to effect a valid license agreement, there needs to be an actual exchange of value from both sides, which lawyers call "consideration."

Indeed. And there was a lot of Consideration given in this exchange. Automattic owned 100% of the WordPress trademarks. Automattic's "Consideration" was to give all the non-commercial use of those trademarks to the WordPress Foundation.

Consider a simple, but apt analogy. You own a car. You decide to give someone else the right to drive your car on the weekends, however you retain the right to drive it during the week. Did you provide Consideration for the right to drive the car during the week? Of course - the recipient previously had nothing and you gave them the right to drive your car on the weekend. The only lack of Consideration here was that the person getting the weekend driving rights gave you nothing in exchange for those.

Indeed, a blog post with more detail is forthcoming.

As I noted above, we are preparing a blog post with further detail about Matt's role in the community. Of course, if that doesn't provide sufficient clarity, let us know.

I believe there was a typo in the post. If you read this thread you'll see a note below from Matt yesterday that the post was corrected.

I appreciate the question and it deserves a lengthier blog post reply that I will work on and share. In the interim, some brief thoughts on the topic that may be relevant.

The WordPress community operates on an open source, non-commercial basis. The community decides what is included in each release of WordPress, how it's tested, what documentation accompanies it, etc.

Because the WordPress Foundation, not Automattic, owns the WordPress trademarks for non-commercial use, Automattic has no control or veto of what code is stamped with the WordPress label.

By contrast, if Automattic retained non-commercial control over the WordPress trademarks it could refuse to affix the WordPress label to work done by and released by core contributor groups.

In case you are not familiar with how WordPress decisionmaking works: Volunteer contributors self-organize into groups that set their own goals, interface with other groups, allocate resources, plan a schedule, and resolve issues according to a Community Code of Conduct (see https://make.wordpress.org/handbook/community-code-of-conduc...). You can learn about how decisions are made in the WordPress project at https://learn.wordpress.org/course/how-decisions-are-made-in....

I am going to operate under the assumption that others may have similar questions, which is why I think this is a good topic for a blog post.

No, that's not what I am saying. Nice try with the leading question though.

So you interpret "is there any part of the Wordpress cluster of organizations that do not ultimately answer to Matt?" as being a YES or NO question?

I interpret it as a request for information about what is Matt's role in the ecosystem and I was gathering information to share about that.

However, if you are not interested in factual information, the answer is: YES, there are various parts of the the Wordpress cluster of organizations that do not ultimately answer to Matt.

While I love pronouns, they can lead to misunderstandings if not carefully defined. Above it was written "I'll take that as a 'no'".

Could you explain what "that" refers to in your statement. I am asking because, lacking a clear definition of the question, I cannot say whether the answer is Yes, No, or something else.

Despite our sometimes fervent wishes, lawyers don't control clients. We are not puppeteers.

Clearly your question is beyond the scope of the article -which means you want more than 700 words. Otherwise you could just read the article.

Hi Legitster. I will work with colleagues on a response to your question. It's a broad topic given how many facets there are to the WordPress community.

Hi, it's Neil Peretz. I was just alerted to your post. I understand there's a question you have. How can I help you?