wordpress license question

you can do all of that you suggest as long as you leave the GPL licenses and statements intact

“GPL licenses and statements intact”

where is that found?

If you own a website business are you able to design your sites around wordpress and sell them?

Yes

Are you able to take these themes manipulate them and sell them to clients?

That’s a little more difficult. My personal take on this is that if you amend the themes to suit the client, you can legitimately charge for the amendments. But that’s not the same as taking full credit for the original theme design.

If the theme is still, essentially, based on someone else’s work, then I think it is only ethical to credit the original author accordingly. You can rightfully claim credit for the amendments but not the original work. At the end of the day, I think it’s a judgement call based upon how much the theme has changed. If you’ve just tinkered with a theme and changed a few bits, give credit to the original author. If you’ve completely reverse engineered and re-written a theme, you may be in a position to take credit as the author but, ethically, I still feel that an note mentioning that it is was based on an original theme created by Joe Bloggs is only right and proper.

Correct me if I am wrong but, any code you technically put online if someone takes that code and changes it at all they can consider it theirs?

If the original code is released under GNU General Public License, then you can change it or use pieces of it in new free applications etc.

Section 4 of the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 3, 29 June 2007

You may convey verbatim copies of the Program’s source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and
appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice;
keep intact all notices stating that this License and any
non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code;
keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all
recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.

You may convey verbatim copies of the Program’s source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and
appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice;
keep intact all notices stating that this License and any
non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code;
keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all
recipients a copy of this License along with the Program

ENGLISH? lol