The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.
The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the software projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come. As part of this mission, the Foundation will be responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks. A 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the WordPress Foundation pursues a charter to educate the public about WordPress and related open source software.
We hope to gather broad community support to make sure we can continue to serve the public good through freely accessible software.
We’re inspired by a number of other organizations and non-profits:
- Mozilla Foundation, making the web and email more accessible and built on open standards.
- Public Code, demanding legislation requiring that publicly financed software be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software license.