WordPress

As was mentioned in slashdot a few days ago, the maker of wordpress (the blogging software used for this blog) was hosting link spam, designed to artificially raise the ranking of websites in search engines by having hidden links to websites that regular users don’t see, but search engine crawlers do. Such practices contribute to the irritating occurance of clicking on links from Google that lead to ‘index’ pages that exist only to link to advertising and pop-up ads (which sadly have begun making an appearance in Firefox again). WordPress is an open source project, and the default configurations have links back to the wordpress.org website (the bottom of this page has it for example). Now all of those links pointing towards wordpress.org give wordpress more authority, which is then used for these somewhat nefarious purposes.

The general consensus was that it was a poor move, which has caused WordPress to be removed from Google’s, Yahoo’s, and MSN’s indices, and no doubt the maker of WordPress feels sufficiently bad about it that he will think twice before doing it again.

The question is, at what point must we examine our usage of tools, based on their source? In this case, the questionable behavior was quickly rectified. But what if the department of defence (or… Microsoft!) released open source tools. Should people have ethical qualms about using that code based on its source? What if it is released and then used for generally evil purposes? Or for a more general example, what about contributing to projects that are generally used to further causes I personally do not agree with? I generally try to buy non-evil products, should it be ok to use ‘free’ projects with evil associations?

2 Responses to “WordPress”

  1. Ira says:

    There is a case to be made for ethical purchasing or use of code. Just as many people eveluate the companies that make their clothes, food, and other items to make sure they are ethical, perhaps we should be evaluating software comapnies to make sure they are ethical before using their code. And what about an amendment to the GPL that says you can modify and redistribute if it’s for anything evil.?