Comments on: WordPress Pulls the Plug on Premium Themes

By: drmike

drmike — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:46:29 +0000

Hmmm, not sure why this is resending pings but…

It got pointed out to Automattic (And I say Automattic because the trademark is still within Automattic’s hand, not the Foundation like they say it is) that material within wordpress is not GPL’ed. It’s ironic that it occurred and sad that they had to fight the developers over the issue.

By: Tommie Hansen

Tommie Hansen — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 11:39:35 +0000

This is absolutely correct. These “WordPress Themes” often lack in a real-world-application anyway and focus should be to have support for themes and theme customization anyway since most themes in their default view will never be “just right” for a _serious_ web site or business site.

I agree totally with Alister Cameron’s post about this subject.

By: Templatelite

Templatelite — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 12:41:45 +0000

My themes are some of those that had been removed from the WordPress theme directory. 25% of my traffic is from WordPress.org and it had dropped to zero overnight

By: Wesley

Wesley — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:18:32 +0000

This is why habari is an interesting alternative that is worth exploring, it allows theme and plugin authors to choose their own license.

By: Episode 49: WordPress 2.7 released, Oxite, Blog World Expo and New Media Expo to merge, Pownce closes - The WordPress Community

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 05:15:52 +0000

[...] WordPress Theme Repository purged of hundreds of themes [...]

By: Hafiz Rahman

Hafiz Rahman — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 01:02:42 +0000

@Jeffro: Thank you, good sir!

@Dr. Mike: Thanks for noticing, link’s hopefully fixed now.

By: WordPress and the GPL | WhatIThink

WordPress and the GPL | WhatIThink — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:29:59 +0000

[...] Public License (GPL), more specifically WordPress themes and the WordPress.org theme repository. (WPCandy has a great post about the in’s and out’s of the whole [...]

By: Dr. Mike Wendell

Dr. Mike Wendell — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:38:11 +0000

The link to the inquisitr.com article appears to be broken.

To be honest though, I find it very ironic that Matt’s once again promoting GPL but yet he and Automattic has been caught many times violating it and copyright themselves. Matt’s known for his “Do as I say, not as I do” attitude. This is just yet another example of it.

My question for all of this is what to do with all of the non-GPL themes out there. Should we say that they’re automatically GPL’ed because Matt (and others) feel that no theme shouldn’t be licensed as such? My own hosted clients are discussing this as we’re trying to decide what themes should be added into our own hosted WP MultiUser installs.

By: Jeffro2pt0

Jeffro2pt0 — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 12:24:11 +0000

Great job Hafiz of compiling the entire situation as well as the coverage into one concise post. What a week that was!