| Matt hits on part of the issue clearly in his update on his post. "I will say we look to Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace as innovators in the space with products that reach many small businesses, and Wix especially should be commended for its success and growth as a public company." It is unfair to take the best parts of your competitors work and so freely use it while ignoring the overall scope of the license which permitted you to do so in the first place, pretending there isn't long established precedent. If Wix wasn't a successful competitor, nobody would know about their use of this code. Nobody would care. Personally - it is why I love the GPL. I removes code from the equation because everyone who takes distribution has the code. So for services and apps, defense comes through excellence in execution, not defense through proprietary code (since running something successful requires so much more than simply code). It's why companies like to defend their market positions through proprietary code. They are afraid (and know) someone else could do it better, so they protect their investment at least by making someone else have to do it over as a hurdle to entry. Anyone can take WordPress.org, make a WordPress.com-like free blog hosting company, and completely compete with Automattic. Many try to with their own stacks, and clearly are not doing as well as WordPress.com. That's telling, and why Matt is in the right. My opinion is that it is a complete sin to include the good work of your competitor in your proprietary code. It is very revealing about the greediness and capacity of Wix's management to pull something like this. Even if they try to come off as good guys. They are hiding something bad. Why? No company this dishonest should be trusted with anything. If I was with Wix, I would move to someone else on principle. So ... what else are they doing? What are they doing with your information they have about you then? And I will for sure highlight this behavior to people I know who use Wix. Their only course of action to fix this is to admit their error and to fully open source their code. If they decide to retreat and remove the GPL'd code, it is a greater admission of what they were trying to do in the first place behind closed doors, and were just "unlucky" enough to get caught. Shame on you Wix. Fix it. I have pity on you for falling victim to Wall Street's greed. You owe the internet more than that. |