AnthonyJust when almost EVERY major theme vendor finally went 100% GPL last year, DW decides to move backward to the so-called “split” license with their Evo relaunch? To echo Ian Stewart (of Automattic), try take away the style sheet and see how your theme look. Honestly, DW team could simply forget about being invited to future WordCamp events. For those who are curious, simply Google split+gpl+wordcamp. I sincerely hope this is just a careless oversight.
JinHi Nameslave,
Thanks for writing us!
We took serious thought on what you have said regarding our WordPress products license.
Indeed there is an ongoing debate over this GPL or not GPL, there are just too many opinions. Our point of view on this is that our Split GPL is actually not a bad thing to both users and authors. You can still use our themes/plugins in any way you want to, no limited domains, you can modify and remove copyright, just that not to resell our original works (non-PHP code). This is what we would think reasonable enough.
So the issue with Split GPL license is that, it does not follow the spirit “above and beyond” of WordPress. We are aware of WordCamp and it is really a pity.
However, we will have a long discussion and take a serious look on this decision again. Thanks for your honest feedback and feeling 🙂
Thanks for your response, Jin. Good to know that you guys will look into this again. Just so you know, the debate around “split” license happened around early 2013 (not to be confused with the earlier one re: Chris Pearson a few years back) and ended happily with major vendors from Envato (ThemeForest), Mojo Themes to Creative Market all going 100% GPL even before Spring officially started last year. I myself spent like US$500 on WordPress themes in these 15 months alone, because I think good design and coding deserve financial rewards in the real world. More importantly, WordPress was born and still is a collaborative effort, which is why it grows so strong and remains vibrant, and which is also why the FREEDOM to use even the style sheets (without which most themes would break) is so important, because it allows the community at large to engage and make things better. Yes, there will always be those who steal and rip off your hard work, but please don’t penalize your customers who are willing to pay in the first place and deprive them of their freedom instead. Again, thanks for listening to my rant.
zylstraI would really like to see a popular plugin coder enforce a non-GPL-licensed PHP WP plugin then see if WP comes after them in court. Of course I’d like even more to see the outcome of that case. Or to take WP out of it, I’d just like to see a similar case ruled upon.
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