The Guardian Unlimited has an interesting profile of Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of Wordpress: WordPress makes a stand for open source morality (via Rebecca McKinnon).

Mullenweg says Open Source is a moral issue: “Software should be free; it’s our philosophy as a company.” And that means anybody can get on there and start writing what they want. Maybe that’s what makes governments so nervous sometimes. It got Wordpress blocked in Turkey, and I’d bet it has a lot to do with almost every free blogging platform being blocked in China.

“We had a bigger problem in China. It set the moral compass for the company. About a quarter of our traffic was coming from China. Overnight it disappeared. For a young company, that’s a big deal - it was a million pages a day. We found out if we were willing to forbid certain words, track people and give up their information if asked, we could be turned back on.

“It was tough. We decided that being there under those circumstances isn’t worth it - we’d rather not be there.” Does that mean WordPress is still blocked in China? “Yes, still blocked two years later.”

Just checked. Wordpress.com is down again. Blogspot, too. And YouTube and Flickr (despite earlier reports).

There’s a case to be made for getting in at any cost, that limited access is better than no access. But it’s good to see someone defining the other end of the spectrum here, saying, “This is the line. We don’t cross it.”

This debate has gone on since the Internet arrived in China, and it won’t end soon. Sometimes you just need a proxy. For anyone needing to evade the Net Nanny, follow instructions posted at Lost Laowai.

One last note: Does anybody else older than 23 get depressed reading profiles of Matt Mullenweg and Mark Zuckerberg? Just checking.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 10:26 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.