WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg lit into Wix on his personal blog. He said he downloaded Wix’s mobile app to review it, looked at the code, and felt déjà vu. The patterns looked so much like WordPress that he accused Wix of theft.
WordPress is open source, but using that code still means attribution, following the license, and respecting norms. Free and open does not mean anything-goes.
The next day Wix answered. CEO Avishai Abrahami published an open letter on the company blog saying he did not know they were “at war” with WordPress. He admitted drawing from WordPress’s open-source libraries, argued that does not mean Wix copied WordPress as a product, and said that is what open source is for. Abrahami offered to share source and noted Wix ships more than three million lines of its own code.
Who is right is unclear. The tension cooled when the two bosses joked on their blogs about meeting for coffee. Another reading: the whole exchange was a scripted spectacle.
