Mullenweg admitted to hosting thousands of keyword-rich articles on the site for a flat fee. Articles on mortgages, retirement planning, asbestos poisoning and vermiculite mining generated revenue for HotNacho.com, developer of a search-engine optimization tool called ArticleWriter. HotNacho then paid WordPress. The payment, Mullenweg said, helped defray expenses for his San Francisco company.
Mullenweg, 21, conceived of WordPress, released under the GNU Public License (GPL), out of frustration with Perl-backed products like Movable Type. With code from hundreds of different programmers under the GPL, “WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software,” Mullenweg said, “not fight it.”
But many in the free software movement, especially after Mullenweg’s comment that “if you do anything for the money you end up selling out,” feel that scamming search engines should not be a revenue generator for an open source project.
“It just doesn’t seem like something WordPress would do,” offered one WordPress.org user. Google is in the process of removing thousands of ads, though WordPress-linked asbestos articles can still be found in large numbers on Yahoo and MSN.
Mullenweg has stated that if the community is offended by this practice, he will stop doing it. Currently vacationing in Italy, he could not be reached for comment.