This post is a response to Michael over at WPCandy regarding his post ”What if Automattic Began Charging To Use WordPress?“
What if Automattic Began Charging To Use WordPress?
If Automattic ever changed the licensing scheme, you can guarantee the project would get forked. That’s how the project began in the first place - it was forked from b2/cafelog by Matt Mullenweg and a few other developers because that project had stopped. There are several other developers involved - over 150 developers contributed to the 2.7 release alone.
Most Content Management Systems, such as Movable Type and ExpressionEngine, come with a hefty price tag attached to them. One of the biggest pros and reasons most people use WordPress, is because, well, that price tag is no where to be seen. But what if WordPress.com started charging a monthly fee for hosting with them and using their app? Or what if WordPress.org started charging for personal and commercial licenses? Would you continue using WordPress and support them for their outstanding hard work?
Most content management systems come with a hefty price tag attached to them for commercial use, not for personal use. I’ll take the two products you’ve mentioned and explain their pricing, starting with Movable Type.
Movable Type
Movable Type has always been free. Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, has a strikingly similar business model to Automattic. But naturally both companies have a different way of doing things. Movable Type, as a brand, is more or less divided into two projects: Movable Type (MT) and the Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) project. Six Apart also owns TypePad and Vox.
MT will refer to the closed source, traditional software and MTOS will refer to the open source spinoff from here on — Ed
MT was designed for the enterprise. The project is not GPL’d, but is instead targeted towards the higher end blogging and enterprise market (for example, Gawker Media uses it). The MT project has always been “free enough”, but the licensing was changed in 2004 to have paid license for blogs with more than one user, or for any more than 3 installations of MT. Naturally, Six Apart needed a way to make money, so they continued on with MT. They currently offer support packages as well as two different flavours of MT designed for “higher end” users. (Movable Type Business and Movable Type Enterprise). These versions have a user limit - you have to “buy” more users or more sites.
In 2007, Six Apart introduced a GPL flavour of the project (MTOS) because they were losing market share. MTOS is a spinoff of the MT product, with the same core as MT. MT is now based on MTOS, albeit with “paid benefits”.
When you say Six Apart charges, technically they don’t. MTOS is free of charge. MT is as well - provided you’re an individual blogger.
ExpressionEngine
ExpressionEngine was created by EllisLabs and offers three variants: core, personal, and commercial. It’s not GPL’d, and therefore not open source.
Unlike Movable Type, there is no user limit on ExpressionEngine. It’s also written in PHP - so it shares some similarities to WordPress. The personal and commercial version, like Movable Type Pro, offers various plugins that extend the functionality of ExpressionEngine. The average blogger could use the core version, provided they weren’t making any profit and they were writing a blog solo.
So, to answer your question, these projects all provide some type of free version.
The WordPress Difference
How is WordPress different? It’s like comparing the bizarre version scheme of Vista to that of Mac OS X. WordPress and WordPress MU are to the WordPress community as OS X and OS X Server are to Apple.
In a way, I would almost like it better if WordPress charged to use their application. I honestly wouldn’t mind paying, oh let’s say, $25 a month for, let’s say, unlimited downloads. Or even $10 per license.
I wouldn’t. That’s the beauty of it - it’s open source. Under the GPL. Sites like WPCandy exist because of the community and the movement behind WordPress. It’s what allows me to patch a bug in Trac and get it included in the source, and it is what lets people get involved in the community.
As one of the organisers of WordCamp Australia, it really angers me that people can think that it would be a good thing. We built a community in Australia and we had fun doing it. A few people were talking to me and mentioning how “cheap” it was, even though I thought our ticket prices were too high. They loved that about the event. You know why? We didn’t charge $800 for a full-blown two day conference and we made no money at all.
Imagine it like this: you’re walking through your local supermarket and you see them charging for use of carts. They charge more or less at different locations. Some even charge if more than one person pushes the cart. Does that seem right? No! Likewise, WordPress is a tool. It has no monetary value. It is literally priceless. It doesn’t need money.
The ideals behind the WordPress project dictates that is that it is open source. I like pushing my shopping cart around for free, and then I can fill it up with all different types of groceries. Similarly, with WordPress, I like using the platform - and perhaps buying a premium theme or having a developer create me a custom plugin.
Imagine how much it costs Automattic to run WordPress? They all work extremely hard and I bet it ain’t cheap. Matt Mullenweg also does a fair bit of traveling around the globe to attend WordCamps and such. Hosting Servers, plain tickets, computer gear, Wii games, and everything else it costs to run a company…it all adds up!
Automattic’s revenue is very stable. Matt has stated repeatedly that WordPress.com is self-sustaining at this point. And in turn, they have VC money. That’s what VC money is for. It’s safe to say the return on the investment that Matt makes travelling is very high. With Matt coming to WordCamp, plenty of people come to learn about the WordPress Project and in turn find out about WordPress.com.
I’ve come across quite a few spam sites in my day, that are powered by WordPress. If Automattic charged for WordPress, this could minimize the amount of spam sites that popup everyday. This may not directly help the community, but in the long-run, it may.
It wouldn’t curve spamming. Spam already exists. People are going to naturally use WordPress for everything. It’s easy to use, it’s simple, and it just works. Spammers would buy WordPress. Spammers aren’t poor people. It’s around for a reason - and it’s not going to go away because of one project. It would be a small blip on their radar. For all they care, they’d just go out and learn Drupal. And this move wouldn’t curve comment spam, if that’s what you’re trying to allude to. Spammers would still leave spam comments on blogs.
Automattic charges for corporate Akismet licenses, so in a sense, spammers make Automattic money. They have to exist. Their very existence makes Akismet, and in turn WordPress, a better platform.
…Especially in the eyes of our clients. Many freelancers, and Web services use WordPress as the back-end for their client projects. In my case with WPCoder, it’s what we specialize in, so we only do custom WordPress theme coding. Some clients don’t like using WordPress because they see it’s free and open-source, which for some reason, is unacceptable.
Just because it’s free doesn’t mean it’s bad. People who say that don’t realise that free isn’t crap. And to be honest, so far all of my clients on WPCoder have been fine with the Open Source model of WordPress. Look at the other projects: MySQL is used by Google Adsense, The New York Times uses WordPress MU, Sony uses Drupal. Open Source Software is commonplace these days.
Open Source is a very viable option, and Automattic has not, will not, and should not ever charge for WordPress. I’m sure my points will be backed up by the community - in fact, I know they will be. That’s what the community exists for.