Everyone loves the idea of GPL and Public Domain when it comes to finding code but when products are developed under some licensing it opens up the flood gates to strip the main designer of any profits.
MATT over at wordpress has decided that it is in his favor to promote Theme developers that fully allow GPL in their themes.
Now this does not restrict the Theme Developers from charging for their works and they can even copyright the portion of work in their Image files and CSS files as matt and James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center say WOOO HOOO COPYRIGHT THE CSS FILE WEEEEE….
What this really means is once the theme is downloaded another developer can add a few lines of nothing to a theme and rerelease it under their own name as long as they don’t remove any GPL announcements.
Don’t believe me read the conversation Matt put up himself between him and his lawyer friend… he wants to squeeze out anyone that makes a buck off of supporting his software.
http://wordpress.org/development/2009/07/themes-are-gpl-too/
THIS IS BULL SHIT…..
Honestly have you ever gone through the Theme directory for most CMS systems…. WordPress is not alone here…
The Themes that are free are CRAP the themes that run some of the top sites on the internet are not free … they take hundreds of man hours to put in design factors that can not be implemented by an average user.
Redhat went through the same crap .. they got full of themselves thinking they could take over the world if only the government would sue microsoft… well look REDHAT IS NOT ON MOST SERVERS ANYMORE IS IT…..
It was Forked into CentOs and people at home don’t install Redhat anymore they install Ubuntu.
Im sorry matt but you got to get a grip on it… Theme developers put in as much or more time in some cases then many of the individual core code developers.
You ever fight the CSS Cross Browser Satan for half the night trying to get every last pixel to line up in Firefox and IE …. That is work tooo… however when we do this work for businesses we are told our work is nothing because our themes follow the calls of WordPress Functions…
You see I understand it
I understand both sides of the question…
But if you are going to FUCK the Theme developers and probably next the Plugin Developers….
You are going to be writing a lot of this crap yourself instead of taking month long trips to southeast asia.
Some guy breaks his ass for a month to come up with a highly polished commercial theme and not only wants to get paid $15 for the initial download but wants to make sure his theme doesn’t end up on Template Monster an hour after he releases it or on some free theme site?
Maybe we should all live in concrete bunkers painted pink….. because that would bring freedom and unity and mutial masterbation parties…
Or maybe you shouldn’t spit in the face of the people that support your software for you for free and design the front ends that make you look good.
No one works for free …. no one works for no credit….
Think about it
