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WordPress Foundation Launched

The WordPress Foundation is officially open for business. The foundation is a non-profit organization with a mission to ensure access to a stable and free platform for Web publishing.

There's not a ton of information on the site just yet, but it does spell out the philosophy of the organization and general information about the new organization.

Free software advocates will be pleased to see that the first item of the philosophy is that all software under the foundation should be released under the GNU General Public License. It also goes a bit further to specify that the framework should allow software to be easily translated. However, it seems that the foundation also wishes to be commercially friendly as well. The philosophy page also says that "should provide a framework for extensions so modifications and enhancements can be made without modifying core code," which paves the way for proprietary add-ons and services.

The Foundation's scope goes beyond just core WordPress. It also lists WordPress Plugins, themes, bbPress, and social media project BuddyPress as projects under the WordPress Foundation umbrella. According to the site, the WordCamp events also fall under the Foundation.

The idea of a foundation has been kicked around for quite a while, and tends to come up for most FLOSS projects that achieve a relative measure of success. The Free Software Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and Open Source Applications Foundation are listed as inspirations for the WordPress Foundation.

The foundation will soon be taking donations to help support the WordPress Foundation and its mission, but the donations page isn't operational just yet.

• wordpress
• Drupal
• foundation
• cms

by Randy Clark on Jan. 22, 2010

Drupal has had a foundation for a while, but it is not a 501 (c) 3. It does do great work for Drupal, though, and it is very functional.

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by Dave on Jan. 22, 2010

This is kind of out of the blue.... I guess I'm kind of out of touch because I hadn't heard anything about a wordpress foundation unilateral today. Of course it's a good thing, but I wiould be a little wary until our fearless leader, Matt, speaks up about this.

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by Dave on Jan. 22, 2010

Ok, I see it was founded by Matt. That is good enough for me!

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by Subhash Nataka on Jan. 23, 2010

I remember WordPress used to accept donations even earlier, though it was buried somewhere in their site. Let us hope they can do some cool stuff and get the community to give back too!!

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by Geryie Santos on Jan. 26, 2010

this is a good news for someone who owned a business, this is definitely a good way to market their service or products..

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