There has been considerable debate (and more debate) recently about whether or not WordPress themes are or should be GPL-licensed. The official word from WordPress and the Software Freedom Law Center is that WordPress themes are only partially GPL-licensed. That is, the php code falls under a strict GPL license, while the CSS and images do not. Put simply, this is really f*&Ked up!
From my non-legal-background reading, this means that if you intend on selling a WordPress theme, you could be on shaky legal ground unless you package the CSS and image files separately from the core theme files. This would make the brand new Theme Installer utterly useless for out-of-the-box proprietary themes.
Personally, I believe that people should only be in the business of selling services related to WordPress themes or plugins, not the themes and plugins themselves. It is simply outside of the spirit of the GPL to sell add-ons to GPL-licensed products. I realize this leads to some questions about how to make money off of creative themes and plugins.
The main question that persists in my mind is: Should people be able to make money off of the GPL-licensed core WordPress code? That is, should we be able to sell themes and plugins? The verdict is still out on that one.
2 Comments
From Toby’s Blog
- Where uncertainty exists, don’t order specific.4 Idiot Case Studies with 2 simple age-old business lessons. The post Where uncertainty exists, don’t order specific. appeared first on Toby Cryns, WordPress Trainer in Minneapolis, MN.
- “Now THAT was a good meeting!”A single effective meeting can change the course of history for a company. Imagine if you could lead effective meetings EVERY DAY! You can, but it takes curiosity & practice. This article is a good place to start your journey to a more effective you. The post “Now THAT was a good meeting!” appeared first […]
- Never Respond to RFPs & Custom Proposal RequestsY'all who work at normal 9-5 jobs don't need to deal with the B.S. that is an RFP process (or rather you get paid to deal with it). But us freelancers gotta deal with a whole big bag of schtuff when it comes to custom proposals. Here's my quick-and-dirty RFP filtering process that I use […]
More posts from themightymo.com
My WordPress Maintenance Process
A few quick things: My WordPress Maintenance Process Demo, Part 1 Transcript: You’ll see immediately after logging in, you see the 11 updates needed as well as some messages. I’m just gonna quickly read. It looks like this. I don’t need to worry about. Are you enjoying Monster Insights? Not really <laugh>. What’s to enjoy…
How to style FacetWP checkbox hierarchy results using jQuery
I recently invested many hours trying to target and style a FacetWP taxonomy facet that uses hierarchy for display. It should be noted that you can use straight up CSS for some styling (and should use css wherever possible), but sometimes you need javascript to target parent elements and such. I thought I’d document the…
How to fix SpinupWP ballooning disk space issue
A site we host on Digital Ocean recently went down. It took me a lot of troubleshooting and digging before realizing that the issue was that our disk space was maxed out on Digital Ocean. The site in question needs ~20gb of space, so our 50gb server should be plenty. But alas, there it was…
From Toby’s Blog
- Where uncertainty exists, don’t order specific.4 Idiot Case Studies with 2 simple age-old business lessons. The post Where uncertainty exists, don’t order specific. appeared first on Toby Cryns, WordPress Trainer in Minneapolis, MN.
- “Now THAT was a good meeting!”A single effective meeting can change the course of history for a company. Imagine if you could lead effective meetings EVERY DAY! You can, but it takes curiosity & practice. This article is a good place to start your journey to a more effective you. The post “Now THAT was a good meeting!” appeared first […]
- Never Respond to RFPs & Custom Proposal RequestsY'all who work at normal 9-5 jobs don't need to deal with the B.S. that is an RFP process (or rather you get paid to deal with it). But us freelancers gotta deal with a whole big bag of schtuff when it comes to custom proposals. Here's my quick-and-dirty RFP filtering process that I use […]
There’s nothing in the GPL that says you can’t sell things! In fact it’s perfectly fine to sell GPL code, images and PHP and all. It’s just that you can’t take away freedoms from people you distribute code to. (Check out my latest blog post about this.)
Thanks for the clarification, Matt! (and great blog post about the issue)
I am beginning to better understand this WordPress/GPL theme debate. At first, I thought it was about money, but the more I read, the more it seems to be about access. The big issue seems to be that non-GPL theme developers want to get their themes into the WordPress theme repository, and WordPress only allows GPL themes in.
This seems reasonable to me.
Based on my reading of the Software Freedom Law Center’s response to your query, WordPress theme developers still maintain licensing control over the design elements of themes (the stuff that makes themes unique), and they can decide to use a GPL license or not on the CSS and images, right?
But maybe I have it all wrong, and it is about motivation, as Daniel Jalkut profers… 😉