Slashdot Mirror
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."
Translation: The company I work for wants to profit off of a legion of other peoples' work, but doesn't feel it has any particular obligation to play by the same rules.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
> 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.
If understanding implications is as easy as you claim, please provide a concise enumeration of all possible technical and legal interactions between any two pieces of non-trivial software of your choice under any combination of your choice of open source license.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Not to come off as a troll (too late?), but it's interesting to see that kind of post on a site that consistently takes an anti-copyright, pro-piracy stance. In piracy articles, other people's work is free to trade. In GPL articles, other people's work suddenly should be protected.
In reality, without copyright, the GPL would have no power, because it's a copyright license! It seems that implication is lost on many people who take a strong anti-copyright stance in the comments for some articles and a pro-GPL stance in others.
wrong. The company is a single entity.
The employee is part of that company.
So no, it isn't distribution.
Source code does not have to be shared.
The employee does not have the right to take it with him after leaving the company.
"In reality, without copyright, the GPL would NOT BE NEEDED."
So the goal of the GPL is to allow people to pirate software?
Without the GPL and the copyright, I would have no obligation to release the source of anything.
could someone post a list of the most cancerous licences so I can avoid ever using them in anything ever?
I like open source but the GPL is sounding more and more dangerous.
when even it's advocates can't seem to agree on what exactly it covers I'd be worried.
If I want to publish something under some other licence OS or not I'd prefer not to end up bound forever to the GPL because my code made a call to some API.