WordPress founder and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg has just announced that his nonprofit, charitable foundation is officially an open shop. The WordPress Foundation is an organization dedicated to supporting and promoting the very mission of WordPress itself. Simply put, as on the Foundation website: "to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software." Everybody dance!

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the 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 will also pursue a charter to educate the public about WordPress and related open source software.

Citing the Mozilla Foundation and the creator of the GNU GPL license as inspirations, the Foundation says its philosophies to serve the public good will require all its projects to be utterly free - as in beer and as in speech.

So far, the Foundation's projects include WordPress, its plugins and themes, the forum software bbPress and social network software BuddyPress. As for future projects, Mullenweg told us, "I think this year we're going to focus mainly on educational opportunities, ways to make rich educational material about publishing and development available to anybody, in any language."

All projects of the WordPress Foundation will meet the following criteria:

• The software should be licensed under the GNU Public License.
• The software should be freely available to anyone to use for any purpose, and without permission.
• The software should be open to modifications.
• Any modifications should be freely distributable at no cost and without permission from its creators.
• The software should provide a framework for translation to make it globally accessible to speakers of all languages.
• The software should provide a framework for extensions so modifications and enhancements can be made without modifying core code.

The Foundation will be setting up a donation process within the next few days.

WordPress fans (and others), let us know what you think in the comments!

Granted, this could be another opportunity for us to herald a tipping point for OpenID. But at a time when solutions like OpenID, sign-on services like Facebook Connect, and all-encompassing solutions like JanRain RPX continue to gain traction, we'll settle for noting that the concept of portable digital identities continues to gather momentum - and acceptance.

In conjunction with the PayPal announcement, the Foundation also announced the election of its officers: Brian Kissel of JanRain, Chair; Scott Kveton of Vidoop, Vice-Chair; Mike Jones of Microsoft, Secretary; Raj Mata of Yahoo!, Treasurer, and David Recordon of Six Apart, Committee Liaison. An international liaison is yet to be named.

If you're interested in hearing more on OpenID directly from the members of the OpenID Foundation, ReadWriteWeb recently had the opportunity to sit down for an OpenID podcast with Kissel, Kveton, Chris Messina, and Recordon to discuss OpenID and its potential.

Can yet another organization really make a difference? Some observers seem to be suffering from Organization Fatigue, but we're interested to see what Berners Lee can do. A group dedicated to deep study of the web and the obstacles to its growth sounds like a great idea to us. Not everyone agrees.

The Foundation launched with a three part plan, including:

• Web Science and Research

Studying the web "as an interconnected complex system (that combines disciplines of science, biomedical science, social science, and computer science, for example)" and creating curriculum for other Web Scientists to be trained with around the world.
• Web Technology and Practice

Advancing standards.
• Web for Society

"To learn from people in socially or economically deprived communities how the Web can better serve them." (Nice that it's phrased this way.) Creating programs to extend access around the world.

Concerns

We are a little concerned about a conversation Berners Lee had with the BBC prior to unveiling the Foundation where he argued that there needs to be some way to brand trustworthy websites as trustworthy. That strikes us as either silly or frightening, possibly both.

Web standards guru and blogger Molly Holzschlag sums up what is probably a common feeling of ambivalence about the new Foundation.

I would love to feel optimistic about this, but at this point I've really decided that creating more groups is just adding layers of problems on top of what we're already doing.

On the other hand, if this empowers greater outreach, education and fosters real influence in returning to the core ideals of an interoperable Web for all, then I'm all for it.

Eran Hammer-Lahav, Open Web Evangelist at Yahoo! and party to the founding of another group, the Open Web Foundation, has sharper words for Berners Lee's group.

Seems odd to ask for money, and a lot of
it, with so little detail as to what this organization is about?...We've been asked many times why a new org, and I think it is fair to ask it back. Seems to me that most of this should/could be done within the W3C. If the W3C is no longer able to promote its own mission, it raises the question: should the same leadership be trusted to run a new effort that seems to try and fix what their first effort failed to accomplish?

We are sympathetic to both opinions here. The problems being engaged with are thorny enough that we applaud anyone for trying tackle them - and the inventor of the web certainly brings credentials to the effort. Also, it's not our $5 million so we're not going to lose too much sleep even if the effort goes no where.

What do you think? Does the World Wide Web Foundation website give you hope that the organization will be effective? If these topics are of interest to you, see also the Digital Divide Network.