I was looking for some great GPL WP or joomla themes I could convert into drupal. And I found the links to download your themes somewhere in a forum (I couldn’t mention it here, sorry). I have asked the poster if they are GPL’ed and okay for conversion, but not an answer this far. So some guys out there had made your themes free illegitimately. I do respect copyrighted materials (paid themes) above the scary karma, that’s why I didn’t even dare to touch the download links even they were there for free. Your statement that they aren’t free had even convinced me that the links should be illegitimate. Hope they stop what they did. Sorry for the bad news I brought here.

No offense taken though. I’m just challenging your opinion / comments.

That said, the GPL is a fairly straightforward document based on very straightforward ideas, which is why incidently you don’t need to be a lawyer to understand or have an opinion on it.

One of those ideas can be paraphrased thus; if you modify or extend this work and then distribute your modified/extended version then be sure to give the people you distribute it to the same rights and privileges you enjoyed.

This simply is not adhered to with non-GPL themes and plugins and I think it should be. I don’t see it as a grey area, but you are right many, many people did and still do despite there being good guidance available (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins).

At the very least, all paid theme designers should share part of their profits with select plugin developers AND contribute to the development of each WP branch.

For example, look at how many paid themes use a Flickrrss plugin as part of their demo test site! You can’t say the Flickrss developer doesn’t deserve a small profit if a site has 20+ paid themes – and all the themes include some form of Flickrss as part of the theme demo.

Or do we want paid plugins too?

I don’t think we’ve gone from being wrong to now being in the right. Months ago we wanted to dual-license our themes (code = GPL; everything else = copyright), which would’ve allowed us to keep the restrictions in place, but Matt specifically called it “packaging gymnastics” and we didn’t make the move. After months though, Matt has admitted (publicly) that this approach is 100% legal, even though neither he or WP will support that.

So imo this is a purely positive move and it’s not about correcting a supposed previous wrong, because I don’t think that we were ever wrong. Instead I think theme developers were caught in a shitstorm & grey area; so it was always gonna take time for the community to figure everything out.

People will always be willing to pay for community and support services for open source products – especially if it’s good support (and I hear yours is)!

This is a move in the right direction but there is a little misdirection taking place. We should not forget it was the theme developers who were in the wrong in the first place.

Small question though. What reason do I now have for purchasing your themes when I can simply download them or get a copy from a friend?

Ok, I personally wouldn’t do that, I’m playing devil’s advocate, but the point stands.