This page has been created to document the processing of various licensing and copyright related issues in the wordpress core code-base as starting in late August 2010. It mostly has raw, close-to-developer information and bare links (see as well: License Issue Listing).
(This list needs to be udpated.)
"Credit definately needs to be given." -- DD32; 2008-03-11
"Matt, You asked the Software Freedom Law Center to clarify the status of themes as derivative works of WordPress [...] licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License." -- James Vasile, Software Freedom Law Center; 2009-07-02
"This is not fair use, so I'd love to see a copy of the license from the copyright holders." -- novasource; 2010-01-26 (about the hello dolly lyrics)
"Attribution requirements are not compatible with GPLv2. Like most open source projects, we handle attribution through commit messages and release notes. Author tags are usually removed before committing, but these slipped through." ryan; 2010-03-03 (about author credits)
"WordPress is a free software that is licensed under GPLv2" -- Aaron Brazell; 2010-08-14
"When WordPress was first forked from b2 it inherited the GPLv2 licenced. It never had the "GPL v2 or later" style statement which would allow it to be re-licensed (sic) under a later version of the GPL e.g. GPL v3." westi; 2010-08-24 (about wordpress license)
"This readme sentence is talking about the license, not the copyright." -- markjaquith; 2010-08-25 (about terms in the readme)
"We check the licenses of everything and have relationships with most of the maintainers of the third-party code we include." -- ryan; 2010-08-26
"The license of WordPress is GPLv2. The license has always been GPLv2." -- Otto; 2010-09-15
"It's distributed as part of WordPress, ergo, GPL." -- nacin; 2010-12-15 (about files in the wordpress package)
"I'm moving all license debates to future release so they don't clog up the Awaiting Review queue, which we nee to keep clear for 3.1 blockers. We will address all licensing tickets in 3.2." Jane Wells; 2011-01-06
"All LGPL code in WordPress is marked as LGPL." -- nacin; 2011-01-14
"WordPress contains libraries only available under the GPL v2 or later. No one cares about the GPL v1 anymore. We are now specifically saying that WordPress is available under the GPL version 2 or (at your option) any later version. This was discussed with the entire core team." markjaquith; 2011-01-14 (changing terms from GPL to GPL v2+)
"WordPress has always stated that its license was the GNU GPL, and has bundled version 2 of the license, even though no GPL version was specified. The text [...] says that if no version is specified, the software can be redistributed under the terms of any version of the GPL published by the FSF." Mark Jaquith; 2011-01-15 (on clarification of license language)