A fight is raging over technology that powers almost half the planet’s internet. On one side is WordPress, a free-to-use website-building software. On the other is WP Engine, a private equity-owned web hosting company. At stake is the question: is there such a thing as a free lunch?

For 20 years, the answer was yes. Programmer Matt Mullenweg created WordPress at age 19 and made it “open source” — free to be tweaked, copied, bettered and distributed. Millions of businesses and websites, including WhiteHouse.gov and TaylorSwift.com, are beneficiaries. They might pay companies such as WP Engine, GoDaddy and Kinsta to host their sites but the underlying code remains costless.

To a capitalist, building something of value and then making it free might seem baffling. But giveaways have led to great innovations. The Linux operating system is open source, as is smartphone engine Android. Facebook owner Meta Platforms has released versions of its Llama artificial intelligence model gratis.