In fact, WordPress started much like this, when in 2003 Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little took another open source blogging system called b2/cafelog and adapted it. So you could download WordPress and amend the code to make it work differently.
In other words, your clients can pay for the code but you have to give them access to it so they can modify it themselves.įor people used to dealing with software companies that aren’t open source, this can be mind-blowing, I know. It means that you can take WordPress, alter it, repackage it, and sell it to other people at a profit, as long as you also apply the GPL license.
So let’s look in more depth at the ways in which WordPress is free. In other words, if you have a copy of the WordPress software, are you free to use it as you wish to, without restrictions? The answer to this is a definite “Yes!” as you’ll see in a minute. The second meaning of free is the freedom of speech.
It will never be free as in speech, though.
A beer can be free in monetary terms, meaning it won’t cost you a dime. The first sense most people are thinking of when they ask if WordPress is free is the monetary sense: free as in beer. These are sometimes referred to as “free as in beer” and “free as in speech”. The Two Meanings of Free Applied to WordPressīefore we can look at whether WordPress is free, it helps to understand the two senses of the word free.