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WordPress Creator GPL Says WP Template Must Be GPL'd
An anonymous reader writes "Matt Mullenweg (the creator of open source blog software WordPress), after review by various legal experts, is sticking to his guns that themes and plugins that 'extend' WordPress violate the GPL if they are not themselves distributed under the GPL. Matt has gone so far as to post this on Twitter. According to Matt, the premium template called Thesis should be under the GPL and the owner is not happy about it. WordPress is willing to sue the maker of Thesis theme for not following GPL licensing. The webmasters and Thesis owners are also confused with new development. Mark Jaquith wrote an excellent technical analysis of why WordPress themes inherit the GPL. This is why even if Thesis hadn't copy-and-pasted large swathes of code from WordPress (and GPL plugins) its PHP would still need to be under the GPL."
Exactly why I don't use the GPL anymore. It's infectious. It's junk for true open-source. This is just copyleft (not that it's claimed otherwise) and is no better than copyright.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
I don't get the vitriol over GPL. If you don't like it, use another license, there are no lack of them. But it's a pretty stupid developer who doesn't check the legal implications of developing on any given platform as far as licensing goes. GPL is meant to be viral, at least as far as publicly released derivatives and extensions go.
A helluva lot of incredibly valuable and important software is under GPL, so on top of being a troll, you're a fucking moron too.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"Go play ball on your side of the court and I'll stay on mine. We can easily co-exist.. as neighbours.. but if you mess with my stuff you have to pay (with labour), as well as you force me to pay (with money) when I play with yours."
More people are getting in trouble with violating the GNU than with abusing copyrights. The reason I'm going to continue violating (and advocate it) the GPL is because of the fact that the same people that are up-in-arms about GPL violations are pro-piracy and even feel it's their right to share copyrighted materials freely.
I don't think it's worth abandoning the advantages of Copyleft just to avoid the stick issue of what exactly constitutes a derivative work.
That's just it. "The advantages of Copyleft" have been illusory. Many enormously successful works have been created with those BSD-style licenses. They continue to evolve and develop without Copyleft. To name just a few, there is the world's most popular web server, all of the BSD operating systems, the X window system, the CPython interpreter and, coincidentally, the PHP interpreter upon which Wordpress relies.
The GPL is a highly restrictive software license. It does not promote freedom and no one has ever shown that its restrictive Copyleft has accomplished anything in spite of all the confusion it has wrought.
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