Theme licensing

The GPL I received with my WP tarball doesn’t explicitly state that I can link non-GPL software to it, so I presume it can’t be done.

Sure it can. Are you redistributing, or are you an end-user?

Again, the GPL is about freedom, and it places no restrictions on how you *use* your GPL’d software. If I want to place my own copyrighted non-free code into a plugin that only I will use, then there’s absolutely nothing preventing me from doing that.

matt: there’s a “we believe they form a single program” and the paragraph below ends with “that is a borderline case”. So I wouldn’t count too much on the FSF’s opinion on court.

Just to a point clear: I prefer CreativeCommons (or public domain) for my work cuz GPL/GFDL just sucks and they are unable to fit it to european law as CreativeCommons did.

“Courts have already ruled against people using GPLed code in non-GPLed apps.”

That’s not relevant to out discussions here, is it? A theme or a plugin is not an app, in both cases they’re “plugins” for an app, which is WP.

I guess if things were clear on this issue, we wouldn’t be debating this.

The real crux of the issue is whether or not a theme constitutes an “original work” or is a “derivative work” of WordPress. I say that a theme is an original work, in most cases, because you can take an existing design/theme, and, for the most part, just plug in some function calls to make it WordPress compatible. You’ll want to do some copy/paste work to fit the WordPress theme mold, but is this enough to make it derivative? It’s a tough call.

Given that I’ve seen themes for WordPress that were remade from themes originally made for other blogging platforms, I’d be hard pressed to say that they are derivatives of WordPress.

I do not agree with the FSF’s stance on “linking” in most cases, mind you, but I don’t think that’s really relevant to the argument. “Linking” when you’re talking about scripted code is a fine line to begin with. Where does one end and another begin?

Regardless, this is only relevant to the theme developer, not the end-user. The GPL intentionally says nothing about how you *use* code.

Sorry to grave dig this topic but I’ve just encountered the issue on my own blog.

I have a couple of questions on the issue. First of all, has there been any cases that offer precedence to this issue?

Also, Matt, has your legal team advised you at all on this?

If what Matt says is accurate (and I believe that it is), wouldn’t I be able to modify and distribute a theme that had supposedly been distributed under the CC license?

Here is the url of the discussion for reference: https://bloggingexperiment.com/archives/is-blogging-experiment-breaking-the-law.php

Hmm, seems that modifying a theme that another developer has placed a distribution license on would bring your theme under their license. That really doesn’t have anything to do with WordPress.

However, most themes are modified from themes were released with WordPress and GPL licensed- says so right in their CSS file. Therefore all of those themes are derivative works, and are licensed according to the original theme.

Were you to start from scratch or a purchased template, and input the WordPress tags (or widgets) to make WordPress work with your theme, there would be no legal issue at all- it’s your theme, you’re just calling data and using system logic from WordPress and the widget makers.

I’ve found that it’s actually not difficult to get a template, break up your template structure into the same PHP file structure, and put in the WP calls that you want.
Even if you copy the WP functions used in other themes, that’s still not copying someone else’s original or creative design since those functions and parameters are provided by WP.

It’s definitely some work, but if you’re developing for commercial purposes and need to make sure that your greedy, scummy competition doesn’t demand that you release your theme to the public so that they can download and use it for free, it’s the only safe road to using WordPress (or any other open source licensed platform).