What is the WordPress Foundation?

The WordPress Foundation is a 501(c)(3) public charity launched publicly in January 2010. At its core, the foundation strives to keep WordPress and related open source software freely available.

WordPress was developed to be studied, modified, and shared. It is released under the GNU GPL, short for General Public License (version 2 or later), which encourages developers, designers, and content creators to collaborate to improve the software.

The foundation's job is to protect the WordPress trademark and to keep the software's open source guarantees intact: licensed under the GPL, free to download, modify, and redistribute.

WordPress Foundation vs. Automattic vs. WordPress.org

Three separate entities share the WordPress name, and they're easy to confuse:

• WordPress Foundation: the 501(c)(3) charity that owns the WordPress trademarks and funds education and community programs. It doesn't develop the software.
• Automattic: a for-profit company that runs WordPress.com, a commercial hosting service built on the WordPress software.
• WordPress.org: the home of the open source project, where contributors build the software and anyone can download it for free.

If you run WordPress on your own hosting, you're using the open source project's software. The foundation doesn't build the software, and it doesn't own WordPress.com. It makes sure the name and the code stay free.

Scholarships and public education

The foundation runs on donations. They fund travel scholarships that bring community members to WordCamp events, including the Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship and the Open Horizons Scholarship, plus public education about WordPress and open source software. The foundation also publishes its financial reports every year, so donors can see exactly where the money goes.

Using the WordPress name in a business or domain name

Describing what you offer is fine, and it needs no permission. The foundation's trademark policy lets any business use the WordPress name to refer to and explain its services, as long as nothing suggests affiliation with or endorsement by the foundation or the open source project. A theme shop can call itself "XYZ Themes, the world's best WordPress themes," but not "The WordPress Theme Portal."

Permission from the foundation is required to use WordPress or WordCamp as part of a project, product, service, company, or domain name. The foundation grants it to non-commercial projects that promote the spread and improvement of WordPress, such as officially recognized WordCamps, and even those projects can't use either name in a domain name. The same line applies to the logos: fine on a page that describes your services, not as part of your own logo or branding. The abbreviation "WP" by itself isn't among the foundation's listed marks, though the policy asks you not to use it in ways that confuse people.

Check the policy before you register a business or domain name. Renaming a company after launch costs far more than reading one page first.