It was bound to happen. There was just too much money involved. Credit: Maderla / Shutterstock The idea of open-source software seems kind of nuts. Millions (billions?) of lines of code doing all kinds of amazing things and available for free? That sounds too good to be true. But it is true. Between me writing this article and you reading it lies a whole lot of software that the people and companies using it didn’t pay for. The most famous open-source project is the Linux operating system. I’m old enough to remember when Linux appeared, and soon took on then-dominant Unix as the software running the internet. Released in the early 1990s, Linux came to dominate the internet by 2015. It’s not even remotely a stretch to say that the internet wouldn’t exist as it does today without Linux. The success of Linux led to many other open-source projects, ranging from major, internet-wide systems to small component sets. The first open-source license was the GNU General Public License (GPL), a “copyleft” license that requires downstream users of GPL code to open their own source code under the GPL. But soon less restrictive licenses appeared, and open-source software became commonplace. In search of a business model But as any economist will tell you, there is no such thing as a free operating system. All software, both open source and closed source, has costs, and most of those costs are taken up by people writing and improving the system. All of those lines of code took humans time to write, and yet the software remains free to use. That’s a really good deal for many, many people. But it requires a lot of goodwill to be sustainable. It’s not entirely clear what the right business model for open source should be. It was originally thought that organizations could give away the software and charge for their expertise and support. One of the original hesitancies about using open source was the lack of “someone to call and yell at when things went wrong” and this model solved that problem. But apart from Red Hat, few companies have made this model work. The rise of software as a service changed things rather dramatically. The SaaS model allows a company to take open-source software, provide it in an easy-to-use form, and charge money for it, all at a very large scale. This seemed okay when startups were doing it. But Amazon soon realized it could use open-source software to provide any number of managed services on AWS, and make a lot of money using projects like Elasticsearch and Redis. Both of these projects ended up changing their licensing to try to solve the Maker vs. Taker problem. I suspect they won’t be the last projects to make such changes. Automattic vs. WP Engine And now we have the battle over WordPress, between Automattic and WP Engine, two WordPress hosting companies. I am not privy to all the details, and I don’t want to get into the personalities involved or make judgments about specific actions taken, but it is pretty clear that Automattic is a Maker and WP Engine is a Taker. That is, Automattic is interested in “making” WordPress, i.e. building and contributing to the WordPress project, and WP Engine is interested in “taking” WordPress, i.e. using the free software to make money from WordPress hosting services. It is not a violation of the WordPress license (GPLv2) to do what WP Engine is doing. It is perfectly legal. In fact, “taking” has been highly encouraged from the very start of the open-source movement. After all, sharing software, and benefiting from shared software, was the whole idea. Free use of software was a desirable outcome of the GPL, though the writers of the license probably didn’t foresee the scale of cloud hosting and the large sums of money that would be involved. Automattic has taken legal action against WP Engine over trademark violations concerning the use of the name WordPress. (Apparently, the right to use the WordPress trademark for commercial purposes is owned by Automattic.) Certainly, the WordPress trademark has value. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know much about how trademarks work, but I do understand the notion of open source. It’s not at all surprising to me that many people who have contributed to open-source software get upset when others take their “baby” and use it to make cash. Free to take, obligated to give back Is WP Engine legally obligated to give back? No. But are they morally obligated? I think so. I think that we all are obligated to give something back to at least a few of the open-source projects we use. Individuals can, through programs like GitHub Sponsor, give a few dollars a month to projects they particularly value. Software development companies might consider doing the same on a larger scale. I don’t see why a company making as much money as WP Engine can’t donate, say, a developer’s yearly salary to the WordPress Foundation. Open-source software has transformed the software business. It has provided an enormous amount of value to all software developers. Most of that value comes from the “share and share alike” ethos that we all learned as kids. But any time so much value can be had for free, a price will be paid somewhere. Sometimes that price will involve hurt feelings and protestations of unfairness. Ultimately, though, a deal is a deal, and a license is a license. Maybe the ultimate price open source must pay is the acceptance of people taking advantage of the generosity that makes open source so great.