Link: WordPress › Blog » Themes are GPL, too
One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
I don’t see this doing much to calm the shitstorm over commercial Wordpress themes (missives from attorneys seldom do); it definitely draws a line in the sand and clarifies something that had been a subject of debate among the Wordpress developer community. At the same time, it would be nice if the Wordpress business did more to support commercial plugin and theme developers (whether the code is GPL or not shouldn’t matter) rather than just providing the occasional blog link or issuing/refuting fatwas.
Related posts:
It’s kind of strange to hear commercial developers moaning about building add-ons for an open source PHP/CSS/HTML project like Wordpress. CSS HTML themes can’t be hidden from a simple “view source” so it is nearly impossible to prevent pilfering. Plugins, on the other hand are a different story because they present working source code which should be the intellectual property of the author.
If that were true then much of the web design industry would be torpedoed. And I hope you’re not suggesting that client code — Javascript, HTML, and CSS — isn’t “the intellectual property of the author,” because that’s not the case. It sounds like you’re confusing intellectual property ownership with open source (a type of software licensing) or view source (a tactic that enables users to see what’s going on in a web page). These are all three very different things.
Just because you have easy access to the source (or something is open source) doesn’t mean that there can’t be a business associated with it. Countless open source businesses (including Wordpress itself) have demonstrated this.
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