I would love to ask Matt Mullenweg if he would of public benefit llc’d Wordpress org foundation / automattic if that were an available business formation at the time
Discussion
What’s the difference? How would WordPress be any different? (honest question)
I’m not entirely sure. The clearer delineation (a lot of people get tripped up on .org vs .com, but it’s still clearER) of having the code published by a foundation might be of greater benefit to public than a pbllc, even just for marketing comms.
But automattic doesn’t have an obligation to continue to fund the charity foundation. Where as a pbllc does have a legal technical obligation to fulfill its mission statement.
I’ve definitely fallen to the simplistic analogy that at proto is like .org and bluesky is .com but it’s not quite as simple or clear as that, but at proto is mit license so its still similar.
I also think there is some technical distinction between wp.org which is just the code presented under a GPLv2 license and the foundation, I’m not quite sure if that’s a business formation distinction or not.
I imagine the answers would be,
wp.org needed to be a charitable foundation, and the code separate, for it to have gotten the wide spread adoption that it saw and for hosting companies to be so willing to offer up one click instal and larger publisher adoption ect. They would of seen a direct relationship to a for profit as a threat
or
we haphazardly juggled trademarks and constantly had to have a team to seek funding for the foundation, with a properly crafted mission statement to hold us accountable that might of been preferable
I did find him on bluesky although looks like he hasn’t been on in a week so probably making an ass of my self by speculating here
I’m not sure if DuckDuckGo would look at a hyperlink protocol that had .ggl (google) in its lexicon and set out to compete, even if it was a completely open protocol, in the same way. Probably would look for a radically unaffiliated protocol or start out by creating one.
If Bing or DuckDuckGo were to launch a social indexing product, or twitter or meta looked to integrate and noticed that they would be indexing .Bsky.post links, that the name of the competing for-profit client/indexer/host was in the lexicon, they might then look to the the corporate structure, which is where a foundation(al) split would sooth any worry about the lexicon or name, and find something new a different. This could lead them to consider using Nostr instead, which is radically unaffiliated, similar thinking as to why David Markus is full on ln network now.