WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL, which runs on
a web hosting service.[5]
Features include a plugin architecture and a template system. WordPress is used
by more than 22.0% of the top 10 million websites as of August 2013 .[6]
WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the Web,[7]
at more than 60 million websites.[8]
It was first released on May 27,
2003, by its founders, Matt Mullenweg[1]
and Mike
Little,[9]
as a fork of b2/cafelog. As of
February 19, 2014, version 3.8 had been downloaded more than 20 million times.[10]
The license under which WordPress software is released is the GPLv2 (or later)
from the Free Software Foundation.[11]
The Free Software Foundation
(FSF) is a 501(c)(3)
non-profit organization founded by Richard
Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, which promotes the
universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer
software,[3]
with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft
("share alike") terms,[4]
such as with its own GNU General Public License.[5]
The FSF was incorporated in Massachusetts, USA,
where it is also based.[6]
From its founding until the
mid-1990s, FSF's funds were mostly used to employ software developers to write free
software for the GNU Project. Since the mid-1990s, the FSF's employees
and volunteers have mostly worked on legal and structural issues for the free
software movement and the free software community.
Consistent with its goals, only free
software is used on FSF's computers
Copyleft (a play on the
word copyright)
is the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies
and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved
in modified versions of the work. In other words, copyleft is a general method
for making a creative work as freely available to be modified, and requiring
all modified and extended versions of the creative work to be free as well.[1]
Copyleft is a form of and can be
used to maintain copyright conditions for works such as computer
software, documents,
and art. In general,
copyright law is used by an author to prohibit recipients from reproducing,
adapting, or distributing copies of the work. In contrast, under copyleft, an
author may give every person who receives a copy of a work permission to
reproduce, adapt or distribute it and require that any
resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same licensing agreement.
Copyleft licenses (for software)
require that information necessary for reproducing and modifying the work must
be made available to recipients of the executable.
The source
code files will usually contain a copy of the license terms and acknowledge
the author(s).
Copyleft type licenses are a
novel use of existing copyright law to ensure a work remains freely available.
The GNU General Public License, originally
written by Richard Stallman, was the first copyleft license
to see extensive use, and continues to dominate the licensing of copylefted
software. Creative Commons, a non-profit organization founded by Lawrence
Lessig, provides a similar license provision condition called ShareAlike.
Free Software data compiled verbatim from Wikipedia
the free encyclopedia