I’m about a week behind commenting on the story that pitted WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg against Thesis theme creator Chris Pearson, but I found myself pondering my allegiances again. Essentially, the fight boiled down to this: Mullenweg was angry at Pearson for selling a theme that used PHP, WordPress code, and WordPress plugin API, all of which are licensed under the General Public License (GPL), without in turn licensing his own Thesis theme in the same way. This license requires that projects utilizing other GPL-licensed code must be instilled with the same share-alike privileges for users, which means that Pearson was likely breaking an as of yet formally untested law by attempting to make all elements of his theme proprietary, and thus, limiting the rights of users to utilize what should have been freely available bits of code.
As the Mashable story to which I linked outlines, Mullenweg eventually came out on top and got Pearson to utilize a split license in which the aforementioned elements of Thesis are now GPL-licensed while the CSS and JavaScript present within the theme remains proprietary.
Thesis is a fantastic WordPress theme, and I’ve worked with it on a couple of different blogs. If there were a WordPress theme for which I’d be willing to pay, Thesis would likely be the only one, and even though I’m generally a fan of free, open-source products, I can’t say I blame Pearson for charging for it even though so many theme developers have chosen to request donations instead of fixing prices. I certainly side with Mullenweg when it comes to the licensing issue, but the CSS and JavaScript are what make Thesis a robust, highly customizable theme, so despite getting bits of it under the GPL, most of the real power of Thesis is still locked away behind the pay wall.
Ultimately, I think this is unfortunate. Most of the ramblings I produce I attempt to place under one of the Creative Commons licenses, and I’m ecstatic to see CC provisions being used so frequently online these days. Maybe I’m more comfortable with these licenses because I’d feel pretty damned guilty for being a prick about someone copping my rubbish for free, though I do usually request attribution. I can’t say I’d feel the same way if I had put a great deal of time into developing a useful plugin, powerful theme, or program of some sort (not that I could). I still think I’d simply request donations and continue on my way as I do try to donate when I’ve found a plugin especially useful.
It’s probably better to view the situation with equal parts ideology and practicality. Open source and alternative licensing have democratized content production on the internet, but it may be overzealous to think the free model will work as an absolute.
RELATED READING: I’m sure many of you have heard of Lawrence Lessig. He wrote a fantastic book called Remix that deals with rethinking copyright issues on the web. You can download the book as a PDF for free. Many of Lessig’s books are listed under Creative Commons licenses.
