[kwlug-disc] Wordpress themes must be GPL

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 10:11 PM, Insurance Squared Inc. <
gcooke at insurancesquared.com> wrote:

> Chris has backed down. He's released some of it as GPL, some of it not,
> apparently stuff like JS and CSS.
>
> So now all that needs to be done is someone needs to rebuild from scratch
> the parts that he's got closed, rebundle, and now the whole thing is open
> source. Which is pretty much exactly the point of the GPL I'm thinking (as
> much as doing so would be screwing Chris out of his perhaps ill gotten
> gains).
>

Does it matter if his gains are ill gotten or that he is a good/bad person?

What matters are the rules, and whether the GPL allows such an action.

If there is a need, then someone will fill it, that is how the markets work
...


> I'm pretty sure the developer version of the theme cost me about $150 bucks
> or so. Next person to buy it should just pay someone $150 to develop the new
> JS/CSS and away we go. And as I noted, I'd actually be using drupal for my
> CMS if there was a Thesis clone. Now perhaps there's a possibility of that
> happening.
>

There are myriads of theme options for Drupal now. Many of them are
extensible frameworks and the specific look and feel can be layered on it by
a themer.


> FWIW, while I love the theme, I have not had much luck with the developer.
> Not long after it was released I actually used the theme on a site that was
> perhaps a grey area. I realized after the fact that I may be breaking the
> license agreement - it just wasn't clear to me once I'd given some thought
> to it. So I asked specific questions to the thesis folks about the
> conditions of their license agreement. Their response? No response. Which
> left me with a fully developed website that I didn't want to take down, and
> didn't even know if I had to take it down. I wasn't too impressed with that.


Looks like one case where the GPL wins: it does not restrict how you use the
software and for what purpose in any way.
-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
2bits.com, Inc.
http://2bits.com
Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. --  Edsger W.Dijkstra
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. --   Leonardo da Vinci
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