I have been fol­low­ing an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion online for the past sev­eral days between the founder of Word­Press, Matt Mul­len­weg, and the cre­ator of a pre­mium theme for Word­Press, Chris Pear­son.  The whole gist of the argu­ment is this:  Pear­son cre­ated a theme, called The­sis, and began sell­ing it.  In the devel­op­ment, he appar­ently copied sev­eral lines of code from the blogging/content man­age­ment plat­form Word­Press (which I use on this site). 

In doing so, Pear­son allegedly vio­lated the terms of the GNU Gen­eral Pub­lic License of Word­Press.  Now, I’m not a lawyer.  I’m rel­a­tively new to the whole GPL thing, and quite hon­estly don’t under­stand it all yet.  But what I do under­stand is this:

The GPL License gives a devel­oper the right to take a piece of soft­ware under the GPL, like Word­Press, and tin­ker with it to suit their needs.  It also gives that indi­vid­ual the right to dis­trib­ute that tin­kered soft­ware as he/she sees fit, as long as that soft­ware remains under the GPL.  It also gives that indi­vid­ual the abil­ity to charge for dis­trib­ut­ing that software.

How­ever, the GPL does not allow an indi­vid­ual to take or copy from soft­ware under the GPL and then place it under a pro­pri­etary license.  This is appar­ently what Chris Pear­son has done with his pre­mium theme The­sis.

Here’s some links for you to peruse regard­ing this topic:

• The debate between Matt Mul­len­weg and Chris Pear­son on Mix­ergy is here.
• Mark Jaquith, one of the core devel­op­ers of Word­Press, gives an intel­li­gent and very suc­cinct descrip­tion of why themes are con­sid­ered deriv­a­tive works of Word­Press and why they fall under the GPL.
• Andy Skel­ton, another Word­Press con­trib­u­tor, talks about the pos­si­bil­ity of a new theme named after the whole brouhaha.
• And then you have the other side, which claims that Matt Mul­len­weg is Marx­ist.  (Oy vey!!)

On a per­sonal note, I have had the plea­sure of meet­ing Mark, Andy, and Matt in Dal­las back in 2008 at Word­Camp.  These guys are all bril­liant, hard-working indi­vid­u­als who have devel­oped a won­der­ful tool for all of us aspir­ing blog­gers.  I see what they have done at Automat­tic and Word­Press as com­pletely within the realm of cap­i­tal­ism; after all, pre­mium theme devel­op­ers like WooThemes are mak­ing money hand over fist and are GPLed.

My advice to Chris?  Quit hold­ing out for the sake of hold­ing out and abide by the Gen­eral Pub­lic License, or take the Word­Press code out of The­sis.   Oth­er­wise you’re just steal­ing, and that is com­pletely uneth­i­cal and not good business.