Dear Matt Mullenweg: An Open Letter from Wix.com’s CEO Avishai Abrahami
The tone of the response really rubs me the wrong way.<p>&gt; Wow, dude I did not even know we were fighting.<p>It&#x27;s not a fight; it&#x27;s a dispute over licensing.<p>&gt; you say we have been taking from the open source community without giving back, well, of course, that isn’t true.<p>No, you were accused of not following a specific license on a specific piece of code.<p>&gt; Here is a list of 224 projects on our public GitHub page<p>Open source is not a swap meet; you can&#x27;t violate a license if you voluntarily release some other code to make up for it.<p>&gt; and we will release the app you saw as well.<p>If that means &quot;we were inadvertently not in compliance, but we are releasing the code and will be in compliance shortly&quot;, then that needed a tweet at most, not a rambling blog post about the fact you&#x27;ve got 224 projects on github.  So I&#x27;m guessing this does <i>not</i> mean they&#x27;re taking steps to become compliant?<p>&gt; Yes, we did use the WordPress open source library for a minor part of the application (that is the concept of open source right?)<p>Yes, along with following the actual terms of the actual license when you use an open source library.  You weren&#x27;t accused of not adhering to the spirit of open source; you were accused of not following the letter of a license (which, if true, means you aren&#x27;t adhering to the spirit of open source either).<p>&gt; If you need source code that we have, and we have not yet released, then, most likely we will be happy to share, you only need to ask.<p>That&#x27;s...what they did.  You need to comply with the licenses of the libraries you use, you were asked to do it.  You will &quot;most likely&quot; be happy to do it?  You were asked; you&#x27;re replying to being asked, and your answer is that you don&#x27;t have an answer, but the odds are good that you&#x27;ll have one someday?  What does this even mean?<p>Considering the sheer mass of words, it&#x27;s amazing that the word &quot;license&quot; and &quot;GPL&quot; don&#x27;t occur even once.  There&#x27;s no attempt to address or discuss the actual accusation being made, just vague assertions that some stuff will be released someday, maybe, if you&#x27;re asked, and hey how about a coffee.<p>All this needed was a tweet: &quot;Thanks for heads-up; will be compliant shortly.&quot;  Or maybe:  &quot;On advice of lawyers, we believe we are in full compliance, thanks.&quot;  Reminds me of an old lawyer joke:  If the facts are against you, hammer the law.  If the law is against you, hammer the facts.  If both are against you, hammer the table.&quot;  I&#x27;m going to mark this down as &quot;table hammering&quot;, and I think it rather sugests that <i>Wix</i>, at least, thinks their position sucks.