Matt then suggested at times that the response from some premium theme developers was a little hurtful. Well, I’m not really sure what he expected.

Yes, a bit of forewarning probably wouldn’t have gone astray.

Your business model idea is an interesting one. It does, sadly, have to sort of exclude the community side of WordPress. However, from a business perspective and in offering services to those seeking them it has potential.

If people feel that the only official source of themes is the repository, and that repository is highly restrictive in who it allows in, then we feel that this will be bad for our ability to offer themes to the community.

True. I wonder if there are enough WP veterans promoting themes that this won’t become the case. I haven’t had much to do with the repository, but it could very well be a first stop for newbies and they could be missing out.

All the best with your future business directions.

shouldn’t all themes for Windows, Mac OS X, and so on be bound by the same proprietary licenses of the respective OSes

The same thought has crossed my mind, but the point of the GNU GPL license is to preserve the freedoms of the users. Where as whatever Windows is under protects Microsoft’s pocket and I doubt they care if developers give their time and work away for free.

I believe his aversion to “premium” themes is more harming to the community than he thinks it is

It’s hard to say what he’s thinking and what is good in the long term at this point. I think Matt wants to protect the community and not have the whole thing turn proprietary, but a lot of people are feeling a sense of rejection over this.

what’s up with the premium WordPress.com features and so on

Well, the GPL is all about distribution. If you distribute your software you need to make the source available, but if you don’t distribute it it doesn’t have to be licensed at all. Technically they don’t distribute the software on WordPress.com. So, David’s idea of setting up your own WPmu with your own themes is an interesting one.

Thanks again!

We’ve done good business for a while now doing themes directly for clients. Most of the code never saw the light of day except in our internal projects. We decided we could release that code first in paid themes, and later pop them into GPL projects. This way we could invest a lot of time and money into solid, well tested themes with great functionality. Seemed the right way for us.

We started out with just the one theme on the WordPress.org repository, to test the waters. Three days later, the mass purge took place. The theme was pure GPL, had a great new way of dealing with threaded comments, and took about a week to develop on top of prior work that was thrown in. Now, a week is quite a long time. In the UK, a good commercial developer working on php/css projects can expect to earn about £800 in that time. So at its lowest price, the theme cost us £800 to develop. We put it into the repository in good faith.

To have it dragged out, kicking and screaming, without consultation or warning was what really fired me. Matt then suggested at times that the response from some premium theme developers was a little hurtful. Well, I’m not really sure what he expected. We’re not in the business of unconditional love.

Curiously, the best business model for WordPress developers is to forget about contributing to the GPL entirely. Stick to corporate clients who need custom work, and for poorer clients just run a hosted WordPress MU based service from which your themes are available. That way your high quality code is protected, and you get to make plenty of money from something that’s relatively hard to reproduce. This is exactly the route that Automattic’s taken in creating wordpress.com, and there’s something to be taken from that.

As a business you have to look very closely at how to make money both today, and in the future, whilst avoiding the risks and pitfalls such as legal action, key employee sickness, etc. Brian Gardner’s model isn’t, we believe, entirely sustainable, even if it’s playing to Matt’s tune.

One key risk is the further integration of WordPress as a software package and the themes repository. If people feel that the only official source of themes is the repository, and that repository is highly restrictive in who it allows in, then we feel that this will be bad for our ability to offer themes to the community. Plugins can already be installed directly from the repository with 2.7, and I’m sure themes are next. Over a period of five years, say, new users of WordPress would almost certainly find themselves directed away from third party theme providers in any way, shape or form. If the WordPress.org community wants to freeze us out, then they can – and very effectively too. As Matt is their leader, and has his own commercial interests, it’s certainly unlikely that they’ll go against him at the moment.

It could, in the long term, be damaging to the free WordPress we know and love, but good for the not so free WordPress.com that millions of people have started using instead of going through the pain of self-hosting.

Time will tell, but we had a five year plan and it looks a little broken right now. How we’ll adapt it, we don’t know….

That may be a simplistic view, but I believe it to be the valid one in this case.

I want to respect Matt as a leader in the WP community — certainly, we as bloggers owe a helluva lot to him — but I believe his aversion to “premium” themes is more harming to the community than he thinks it is. Clearly, there is a huge market for premium themes (Thesis is evidence of that), and that market is growing all the time. What Automattic should do is allow any theme to be listed in the themes directory; premium themes could link to its purchase site, free themes to the (hosted?) download, similar to the Apple software store thing.

The only problem that should exist with premium extensions — themes or plugins — is how they are dealt with by the automated installers within WP (2.7 for plugins, 2.8 for themes [hopefully]).

Finally — and this will perhaps show my naïvety, but if a theme is required to be GPL (and/or “non-premium”) because it adds to WordPress, then what’s up with the premium WordPress.com features and so on? Are they not extensions of WordPress as well?

Obviously, I’m not a lawyer, but it seems that precedent has been set regarding how themes can be licensed based on the OS theming mentioned earlier. If there was a legal fight to be won over the issue, I bet Microsoft would have brought the hammer down a while back… and I likely wouldn’t have had the super awesome “Star Trek” theme on my Win98 computer almost a decade ago.

My thinking at the moment is that Matt is pushing the definition pretty far, further than it has been before. However, of all people, he and the other WP devs probably have the right to. Like he said, if they’d wanted to make concessions in the license, they would have.

What I’ve heard from people (mostly in vague bits and pieces), who I know have had experience with free software and licensing before or consulted their lawyers, is that they don’t think themes should be derivatives. However, I’m yet to hear a solid “why” themes aren’t derivatives and among the people who say they are derivatives some people say it’s because they use WP functions and some people say “Well, if it doesn’t work without WordPress…” To be honest I think the latter is silly, there has to be some reasonable threshold for fair use, as Lynne said before. The functions thing may have some merit and the way themes are going in terms of complexity there will be more and more functional interaction that pushes them past the grey area I think they’re in now.

If I were to create a theme right now it would be pretty complex and would interact heavily with WordPress. I would release it as GPL or a compatible license and find other ways to make money with it if I needed to. I guess because I would value the support of WordPress and the community. However, I’m not yet at the point where I will stop using or promoting Thesis. I’ve never been happier with the way my blog is running and I think there is still significant doubt in this area.

I think what Laurence says in the article you linked to is a good point, If a GPL-covered program is designed to accept separately designed plugin programs, you don’t create a derivative work by merely running such a plugin under it, even if you have to look at the source code to learn how. WordPress was designed to run themes and plugins and until now they never specified that those things were derivatives and should be GPL.

Folks are saying that we can’t really know until it’s tested in court. That is a sad state of affairs and I hope it’s not true.

I guess that, since I am a end-user of Thesis, and not a developer, I have no worries either way this shakes out. It is still of interest to me, though, because of my interest in open source software and free software (I think Matt does do a good job emphasizing what the Free of Free Software really means … the freedoms it fosters).

Anyway, thanks for the discussion. Where are you at in your thinking on this now?