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Wow. If you haven't heard the drama, you should watch this video. In short, a premium theme developer (DYITthemes) which sells a wordpress theme named Thesis does not release it under the GPL license.
Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder and leader of Wordpress is calling him out on it; "when you violate someone's license it is breaking the law. It's a definition of breaking the law."
Chris Pearson says he doesn't have to release his theme under the GPL "They are not the highest authority node up on the tree that gets to decide everything that happens underneath them."
You can watch them get all sassy with each other for an hour, if you want. Plenty of people have and some of them are asking for our view on it.
concrete5 is a competitor to Wordpress in ways, and we had to choose a license when we started as well. We specifically did NOT choose the GPL for exactly this reason. Here's how we see it
1) Much of this is about distribution. Our understanding of this is pretty simple:
If Thesis is distributed as a stand alone download that /includes/ a copy of Wordpress, then Chris is legally wrong. If you distribute GPL software, everything you add to it has to be GPL compatible. Clear and simple, period.
If Thesis is distributed on its own, I think Chris might have an argument to make. It's easy to think "hey this does nothing without Wordpress, it is dependent on it, it needs to honor whatever legal requirements Wordpress comes up with" but I don't think that's technically true. The GPL is about the copying and distribution of software and it doesn't really cover this with a tremendous amount of clarity. There's plenty of examples that would have been a lot more interesting to discuss than what they did in the interview. For example, just because you've written software that runs on Linux doesn't mean it has to be GPL. If you distribute Linux WITH your software as a single solution it does however. How's that for weird?
Regardless, Chris would have a much better high ground to stand on if Thesis actually worked with different CMS backends much the way that C# application you wrote for linux could also run on a variety of other operating systems.
2) Matt seems like an awful nice guy, and Pearson comes off like a total douche in this interview. I've never met either, I'm sure they're both awesome, I'm just saying after losing an hour to listening to this crap there's a pretty clear answer for who I'd like to have a beer with. That's a tremendous shame because frankly Chris is the underdog here trying to build and maintain a nice small business and Wordpress is the big player trying to squash entrepreneurialism. Regardless, Matt comes off as the hero cause he's a nice guy and Chris comes off poorly because of the way he makes his arguments. Important lessons there, it's probably time for us to do a better job stripping drupal references from our customer testimonials. 
3) Wow you can tell the difference that some funding makes. Let me just be clear about what I believe to be the real motivators here, please correct me if I'm mis-informed: Wordpress Automattic has raised over $40m in venture capital. They have over 25 million blogs out there, and fundamentally they are in the content business. They don't make their real money by selling wordpress, or taking a cut of marketplace add-ons, or offering paid hosting, or any of the stuff we do, they make their money on content. The advertising value on wordpress.com is huge. You have 25 million individuals using your platform to create content, you can monetize that in big ways. That's why wordpress may be frequently used as a CMS to build some corporate site, but you'll never see their core team drop features that help my wife (who has an active wordpress blog about DIY sewing), in favor of features that make some corporate extranet easier to run. Matt doesn't have to worry about making payroll in two weeks, he has to worry about balancing ads and content on Wordpress.com so my wife keeps going there to find other cool sewing blogs she wants to cross link to. Wordpress's real competitors are Twitter, Facebook, Google they're in that big business of re-inventing media. That's why the GPL makes sense to them. The more wordpress is out there, the better for wordpress, as long as it's called Wordpress.
Chris on the other hand is selling a Theme that helps turn Wordpress into a application that does something more. Again I'm just guessing here, but it wouldn't shock me at all to hear Chris's company is self funded, profitable, and it hasn't been easy to get there. The idea of having a product that you sell at $50 a pop being distributed for free or even worse sold for $49 somewhere else has to make him physically sick. The carrot of "but people will want you for support" is a pretty grim answer.
I'm not arguing that Matt has an easy life and Chris doesn't. Certainly the stress of looking Phil Black in the eye and saying "yes your $40m will turn into $800 million, sir" can't be fun. I'm just saying the two challenges are very different and you can read the distinction in motivation from just the tone of their voices alone.
4) The GPL is stupid, and O'Reilly did us all a tremendous disservice when he came up with "open source". Yeah I said it, so blah! When I was a developer growing up in the 80's, we had licenses that actually meant what they said. If you wanted to just give something away, you called it Freeware. If you wanted to save some money on sales but still own your software, you called it Shareware or Crippleware depending on if you offered a fully functional copy with additional features or if you did something like disable save. These labels came from the DIY software world where entrepreneurs could start successful businesses cheap by distributing stuff on BBS's. (go look up Apogee Games). Meanwhile there were any number of "big" projects that were being distributed under licenses that made sense for schools and huge corporate problems. NASA develops some standard and wants to share it with the world, how do they do that? Several big software vendors see value in a piece of software existing, but not being "owned" by any commercial entity, how do they do that? Everyone wrote their own license and while it was confusing, it worked. Then in the late 90's the successful technical book publisher O'Reilly came along and dubbed everything I've listed as "Open Source" for the benefit of the media which was having a hard time understanding how Linux could compete with Windows. Well that's cool and all, certainly having concepts that everyone can understand in a word is great, but clearly we aren't really there. Confusion abounds. People talk about "free beer vs. free speech" all the time, it sounds like a broken record. Any one with half a brain knows that nothing worth having in life is truly free (in cost), yet we also agree that the idea buying a car with the hood welded shut sounds like getting screwed. The goal to provide some clarity across all the different types of licenses that software was released under by calling half "open source" and the other half "commercial" has utterly failed.
5) You say you want freedom? Then the GPL isn't for you. It is not "freedom" to force people who extend your software to honor ANYTHING you say. I'm not saying it isn't a good business idea, I imagine it may frequently be a great business idea, but it's not "freedom" so don't try to take the moral high ground. You're limiting people and it doesn't matter that the perceived motivation of your limit is to enforce further freedom. Freedom doesn't work that way, but proponents of the GPL seem to think it needs protection. Here's how we see it:
If you're for the GPL, you believe freedom is a fragile flower that has to be protected. "This started as free, we're going to make sure it says free with all our impressive powers."
If you're against the GPL, you believe freedom is a force of nature. It may not look that powerful at a glance, but it's gonna win in the end. It's like entropy. It exists, it will win. It doesn't need your help, all it needs is your awareness and faith, and sooner or later it'll come out on top.
Freedom is the MIT license which to paraphrase in three words says : "Don't sue us". If your goal really is to give something away for no cost and have the world be "free" to do whatever it wants with it, that's all you need. Limit the creators exposure to liability, which would limit their own freedom, and you've made it "free." Of course if you do that you run the risk of someone taking your software packing it up and screwing you over in any number of ways, but no one said freedom was easy.
These issues with the GPL are not new, and it's sad to see this play out yet again. Frankly I like to think that any legal document's job is to create clarity, and whatever your view may be, its clear the GPL is pretty gray in spots. In some ways, I hope this does go to court so we can all get a clear answer on how this thing is supposed to work.
Meanwhile if you want to be part of something that is free, and is eager to be free in a simple understandable way, you should be developing stuff for concrete5.
UPDATE : Orrrrr I'm completely wrong.
As more debate continues in IRC and other forums a point has come up that we didn't address in the original post. Thesis uses wordpress's theme engine and that includes any number of lines of code that wordpress wrote. Clearly that is their work, covered by their license, and Thesis is a derivative of it. THAT being the case, he very well may be violating the GPL. What gets interesting there is where is the line for that not being derivative? If he just goes through and renames all the functions and variables but it functions the same way, is that new work? What if he changes some logic too, for loops become while loops, etc. Where is the line where something is no longer derivative but a new thing?
What if Thesis makes an abstraction layer from scratch that does nothing but give them some differently named hooks to the same stuff, and then releases THAT abstraction layer LGPL and continues to sell their theme? That sounds legal, annoyingly stupid but legal.
Regardless the fact that everyone's so confused about this does bring serious questions to the fore on the worth of GPL and what ‘freedom' means. I hope we find out.
Hey! Andrew again, and I'm going to recap the news.
Archived Comments from first show
(used to pick winners)
Posted by LucasAnderson on Jun 25th, 2010Who's doing the Julio dance later?
Posted by MSneor on Jun 25th, 2010Will we be able to create Mobile Websites one day?
Posted by LucasAnderson on Jun 25th, 2010Are there plans from the core team to make the form block better so we can template it easily? I know the community is working on this.
concrete5 Support Available to Everyone
Open Source CMS concrete5 Now Offers Incident Support
Portland, OR June 22, 2010 -- Two years after going open source, concrete5 now powers over 50,000 websites, only a small handful of which are actually hosted by the project's core team. Now concrete5 site owners can easily get support on a per instance basis regardless of where their site is being hosted.
Ever wanted to see how a conversation REALLY goes around the concrete5 offices?
Well this is your big chance.
This Friday the 25th we'll be doing two live video shows from our offices, one at 2pm Pacific in English, one at 8pm Pacific in Japanese. Join us on uStream for these exciting events!
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/concrete5japan
Here's a thread in the forums discussing questions for the shows.
Just to provide some added incentive, we'll be giving away over $1,000 worth of add-on licenses during these shows.
This package provides a complete real-estate solution for realtors wanting to offer searchable property listings on their websites.
This package includes:
We think Six Revisions is an awesome blog with great content, if you don't read it, you're missing out.
We've been working with them recently to help drive awareness about concrete5, and we're having them do a fairly sizable giveaway of our stuff now:
"concrete5, an open source content management system created for the end-user (e.g. your non-technical clients) teamed up with Six Revisions to give away a one-year Commercial account (worth $300), free set-up, and $155 in credits on their marketplace for themes and add-ons. Read on to see how you can be the lucky winner of this awesome prize."
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Hey! Andrew again, and I'm going to recap the news.
This Week's News
- Launched some Add-ons:
- Featured showcase Lars Reese Photography and Saelstrom Marketing
- I released two new how-to's:
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- How to integrate google search by melat0nin.
- How to add sitemap and file manger link to tool bar by jedspurg
- Some traffic came from DesignTutorials4You and Osalt
How we assign your karma raffle numbers
We have three databases - one for each type of contribution (Promotion, Helping People, and Developing). For each Karma point a user has in a silo they get a number of tickets assigned to their name so we end up with 1,000,000 total tickets. Then to build random numbers from toys in the Kidd's Toy Museum.
The Winners, and What They Got
Watch the video to see who won what.
Most of what I've learned from going open source are just good life lessons I probably could/should have picked up anyway, and this one's certainly in that camp. I've always idolized the renaissance man. I'm a big believer in knowing a little about a lot of things vs. knowing a lot about a little. I respect the need for specialists, but even then I think they tend to be better when they've put in the work to stretch their intellect across more than one silo of information. It builds empathy and humility to not always be the expert at what you're interested in.
Going open source has provided me the opportunity to run into any number of people who are very very bright at one thing, don't foster that fundamental curiosity about topics they have no expertise in, and yet seem to think their impressive intellect makes their opinion right on all topics regardless. Just because you're amazing at the 100 yard dash doesn't mean you know dick all about water polo.
I actually had one person complain about their in-ability to do something in concrete5 with the line "look, I /am/ a rocket scientist at such and such university.. I should be able to XYZ." Strangely I am not a rocket scientist and I dropped out of college, but I can do XYZ quite easily. Go figure.
I was reminded of this just now when a thread on slashdot came up. Some fellow is chastising Apple for calling their new iPhone screen technology "Retina Display." Apparently this "marketing drivel" has so offended this guy he feels the need to rant about it on slashdot:
"Again though, why the use of meaningless words? Couldn't he have just said "the resolution/DPI is so dense that your eyes won't be able to distinguish individual pixels"? What, does the average Apple customer really seek the need of some special word to wrap up the device's capabilities in? And if they do, what does that say about their average customer?
I think it's insulting to the people that buy Apple's products, regardless of whether people seek it out or not."
Holy crap dude! For real?? Yes. This is what we have language for. You use words and phrases to sum up larger concepts so a conversation can happen at an acceptable pace. Words do create some ambiguity as definitions tend to be subjective, but without some consolidation it's difficult for anyone to get beyond facts and into useful concepts in a real world situation. I mean clearly this individual is smart enough to understand what a pixel is, how DPI might work, etc But the basic purpose of language (were not even talking about marketing yet!) seems to not only escape them, but insult them as well.
I take two lessons from this:
1) I am a moron. This one shows up a lot in my life lessons from open source. So far I find the dumber I assume myself to be, the more pleasantly surprised I am when I get something right. If I am hearing about something that others think is awesome and my geek-gland says "that's stupid marketing drivel," chances are they're right and I'm wrong.
2) Just because you're talking to someone "smart," doesn't mean they have a clue what they're talking about.
When we were commercial software things we're, quite frankly, easier in a lot of ways. We had a few dozen clients we had active relationships with, and we worked on about half a dozen projects at a time. In those days it was pretty easy to try out a new idea with the CMS because we would simply put it on the latest clients setup and see what happened. We didn't really worry too much about keeping everyone on the latest version of the platform, and subsequently we didn't have to spend a lot of time worried about backwards compatibility.
We also didn't see a tremendous amount of intentional abuse of our systems. While we did build some large, active, and successful sites, the code behind them was only open to people who had worked with us in the past. To break one of our sites in the commercial days, you'd simply have to guess at vulnerabilities instead of being able to scour code for them first.
Now things have changed. Every feature idea we have is more and more tempered by "what will this do to existing sites or old versions." We've learned about (and quickly addressed) any number of vulnerabilities that some guy in his basement found for free when paid consultants had found none for five years before. You quickly learn that even the most well intentioned work can cause havoc.
For example, there are two blocks in concrete5 that are commonly used to build navigations: the Auto-Nav block and the Page List block. The Auto-Nav block had been built to honor a certain variable you can set at a page level to hide that page from the navigation. The Page List did not honor the same attribute, and someone from the community pointed out that it really would make more sense if it did. We agreed and "fixed" it as part of some other version changes. Weeks later, people started complaining that their sites we're missing pages. After some frustration we realized "duh" of course people had built sites that worked around the way the blocks behaved in the past and the simple "fix" to the Page List block actually broke their sites.
We spend a lot of our time trying to manage issues that could mature like this now. I tend to take much longer to release something than I used to. I tend to be more thoughtful about the reasons and needs behind any feature changes. The temptation to "fix" something that could have been better implemented in the first place is very strong. Learning to first resist and then very delicately architect not necessarily the perfect, but rather the lowest impact solution, has been a new adventure for me. Once you go open source it is safe to assume that someone somewhere who is smarter than you and has all the time in the world, is finding the mistakes, finding the holes, and making up their own weird work-arounds which will impact you later. Be careful what you touch because no good deed goes unpunished.