The bill is coming for tech’s open source free lunch

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A fight is raging over technology that powers almost half the planet’s internet. On one side is WordPress, a free-to-use website-building software. On the other is WP Engine, a private equity-owned web hosting company. At stake is the question: is there such a thing as a free lunch?

For 20 years, the answer was yes. Programmer Matt Mullenweg created WordPress at age 19 and made it “open source” — free to be tweaked, copied, bettered and distributed. Millions of businesses and websites, including WhiteHouse.gov and TaylorSwift.com, are beneficiaries. They might pay companies such as WP Engine, GoDaddy and Kinsta to host their sites but the underlying code remains costless.

To a capitalist, building something of value and then making it free might seem baffling. But giveaways have led to great innovations. The Linux operating system is open source, as is smartphone engine Android. Facebook owner Meta Platforms has released versions of its Llama artificial intelligence model gratis.

When users give back, open source flourishes. At WordPress, developers create “plug-ins” and make them free for others to use. But in September, things came unstuck. Mullenweg decided that WP Engine, whose biggest investor is private equity group Silver Lake, had not contributed enough. He branded the company — in which he was once an investor — a “cancer”.

For WP Engine, this could spell the end of the free lunch. Mullenweg has demanded royalties for using the WordPress name in its marketing. Worse, he has banned WP Engine from using WordPress.org, the site that hosts the latest code and plug-ins, which it turns out he controls. That has already led to a lawsuit.

This dispute has wider implications because open source is getting more important. The launch of open AI models will embed free technology in even more businesses, large and small. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg hopes an ecosystem will spring up around Llama as it did around WordPress. The Open Source Initiative, a non-profit, has argued Llama does not fully meet the definition.

What matters most is not openness but predictability. Mullenweg, who also owns a for-profit web-hosting service called Automattic, seems to be freezing a rival out of a resource that was previously open to all. While the nominal cause is a trademark dispute, the effect is that the rules governing WordPress are suddenly fuzzy.

Whether it ends amicably or in the courts, the debacle is a wake-up for businesses whose future profit depends on open source — and their investors. The lesson: be sure of the difference between what is free, and what only seems to be. As for open source creators such as Mullenweg, if they are going to give something away, they need to be OK with others getting rich as a result.

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