WordPress Creator GPL Says WP Template Must Be GPL'd

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 22, 2010 @07:48AM from the several-sticky-wickets dept.

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."

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He has no case by MikeRT · 2010-07-22 08:03 · Score: 5, Informative

If he's taken GPL code and put it in Thesis, game over. It's GPL. Period. Whatever he could have argued about API calls is now irrelevant.
At this point, the only thing I'm curious about is what would happen to WordPress users who start to distribute Thesis without his permission.