[mk3]

People should realise that Matt also has for profit company Automatic and it's mostly defending his cash cow rather than spirit of open source.

Also speaking about originaly MIT licensed editor code which suddenly becomes GPL: Taking someones work adding modifications on top and slapping different license on top wildly unethical. As it benefits only the person who slapped GPL on top. As I know if you use GPL licensed code you must have GPL license. At least in wordpress case: https://wordpress.org/about/license/. So author can not use the improvements Automatic engineers made while using his library for profit.

[ryan-allen]

Very true. Automattic have heaps of closed source code to run their proprietary platform and they don't release that to the public, yet they demand it from others.

Mullenweg has a history of "do as I say not as I do" in regards to GPL, and to my mind it's a bit of sour grapes on his part.

[league]

Distribution changes this. They do not distribute WordPress.com for download. They do distribute WordPress.org

[mpcod]

Automattic doesn't do anything with WordPress.org but contribute to it.

WordPress.com uses a lot of WordPress.org code and other open source code (that they wrote and distribute), but I imagine there is a lot of (probably stupidly ugly) back end stuff they have not released that helps them run a service as huge as WordPress.com ... but they aren't distributing it so... if they did, I am sure they would do so under GPL.