Nic Steenhout blogged a peeve with WordPress and pointed the NZOSS list at it, whereupon we all opined wisely.
I don’t agree with Nic that this is the fault of the GPL. I can agree that one person who believes strongly in the GPL has brought about a situation where he is doing what he thinks is right. However, I think the situation raises an issue that many FOSS projects face as they become successful.
What’s seems to be at stake is a lack of clarity about who owns WordPress.org and what they’re allowed to do with it. So, what happened?
On 9/10 December, Matt Mullenweg (the creator of WordPress) deleted 201 themes out of ~700. People whose themes were deleted got a one-line email saying (more or less) :
“Links to [your_site] will no longer be approved, as a result this theme has been suspended”
[from http://spectacu.la/wordpressorg-pull-200-gpl-themes/ ]
This has caused a moderate-to-large uproar within the WordPress theme community who feel that they had some investment in WordPress and the themes, and that a GPLed theme is a GPLed theme and why can’t it link to a site where other themes can be purchased? These people are peeved with Mullenweg for a) high-handedness, b) personal prejudice and c) failure to communicate before during and after the event. (I tend to agree on all three, incidentally, especially c).
The issue that Mullenweg appears to have is a desire to have no commercialism at all associated with WordPress. His revenue comes from his company Automattic (which he founded in 2005) and which provides (AFAICT) consulting services and open source projects .
Eventually Mullenweg emailed a few of the complainers to say:
“There were also a few that violated WP community guidelines, like the domain policy. So since Monday we’ve been clearing stuff out en mass. If you’re kosher with the GPL and don’t claim or promote otherwise on your site and your theme was removed, it was probably a mistake. Give us a week to catch up with the bad stuff and then drop a note.”
[http://www.blogherald.com/2008/12/12/200-themes-removed-from-wordpressorg-matt-explains-why/]
So, what he’s trying to do is prevent the people who create commercial themes posting free GPLed themes to wordpress.org as tasters leading you to their commercial sites. Which to my mind is dumb, as a project lives or dies by its community (unless it has a swag of VC$ – Oh, wait…) but he seems to think it makes sense. Good luck with that, Matt.
It seems to me that WordPress is growing very fast – Dave Coveney notes in his post that they have taken $US29.5m in venture capital. That means they can afford to be purists about their code. Undoubtedly, Mullenweg is very committed to the GPL and FOSS. I think he may be trying to exert control over something that he feels is slipping out of his grasp. He wouldn’t be the first project initiator to do that.
Like others, I had to do a lot of reading to get this far. It’s a small arcane battle in essentially a private corner of the web. I don’t agree with Mullenweg’s analysis of the GPL and just how far you can take the “derivative work” approach, but I also don’t agree with Nic that this is a move in some GPL plot to strangle FOSS.
The Drupal community have addressed this, in relation to themes. AFAICT, their consensus is that the underlying template is GPL, but that the additional CSS, javascript and images are independent from Drupal.
I think that has merit. To claim that every tweak or use of a site using the WordPress software must be a) GPL and b) non-commercial is daft. Kids have gotta eat, after all.
However, it’s not as if Mulenweg has initiated code that prevents these “premium themes” from working in WordPress – he’s just refusing to host them or allow links to sites that sell them to be hosted on WordPress.org and, as he’s the guy who holds that domain, he’s got every right to make that decision. Not because he’s the father of WordPress, but because he holds the domain name and the site on that name.
This is what the complainers have failed to understand. He’s said, effectively, I don’t like what you’re doing and I’m not going to support it by doing your marketing for you. The issue is easily remedied
by the complainers – build your own damn theme repository!
I think theWordPress community still have some work to do to sort out the nature of themes and what part of them is derivative, as I’m a little dubious about his wholesale claim. But the lesson for Mullenweg may simply be to learn to communicate. You’ve got to nurture a community if you want it to flourish and, if you claim that themes are derivative works, then theme developers are part of your developer community.
[Disclaimer: This blog runs on WordPress, though I host it myself]
6 Comments
“This is what the complainers have failed to understand. He’s said, effectively, I don’t like what you’re doing and I’m not going to support it by doing your marketing for you.”
Thank you for listening to that.
“The issue that Mullenweg appears to have is a desire to have no commercialism at all associated with WordPress.”
That’s not at all true — I have personally met thousands of people who make their living from WP and I want that number to grow even more. The folks who are doing things contrary to the GPL are a minority. I’m happy to promote businesses and people providing products and services on top of or around WordPress.
Fair enough. Thanks for stopping by.
It’s not true that Matt doesn’t want any commercialism associated with WordPress. He merely doesn’t want there to be any commercialism that doesn’t financially benefit him. The reason he doesn’t want people selling their themes is not because he lurves the GPL so much, it’s because he wants to sell the themes on their behalf and cream off half the profits.
In an ideal world, the community would have forked the software the first time Matt got caught using the wordpress.org site to further his own financial interests. They didn’t (mostly because the development process was pretty closed and nobody other than Matt had any real power or influence) and now, inevitably, wordpress.org is being used to promote Automattic and hurt its competitors.
Thanks for commenting (not sure why your comment needed moderating – oh, well…)
I followed your links. On the first, I don’t see the problem. Volume would, as Matt noted, have probably returned as good a profit as going it alone with a custom job. As the host, he’s wearing the traffic, he’s entitled to a cut. Half might be a little much, but that was a suggestion and the market negotiations could have sorted it out.
On the second, yes, dodgy, but everyone is entitled to a mistake. 3 years is a long time in the net world.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending him – I disagree completely with his assessment of the GPL and derivative works. But I’m equally aware that many on your side of the community are prepared to demonize his every breath, so let’s keep some perspective.
I don’t think it’s wrong to want to make money. Doing it in the open source world is a tightrope walk and very easy to slip.
I agree that Matt has every right to decide what he links to or offers for download from his own sites. Where I do have an issue though is that Matt is not extending the same thing to other people’s sites, as can be seen here: http://www.jeffro2pt0.com/why-were-200-wordpress-themes-removed#comment-2929 and here: http://www.jeffro2pt0.com/why-were-200-wordpress-themes-removed#comment-2949
The theme directory, which Matt controls, has guidelines saying the themes must be GPL and that a link back to the author’s site is acceptable. Now, that author’s site must also prove itself to be following the same position on the GPL that Matt espouses, namely that everything must be GPL and free. Some of the themes that were removed from the directory linked back to a theme developer’s site where there are simply a link to another site offering premium themes.
I agree with you that this debacle is not about the GPL, per se. However, Matt is a leader of a well-known FOSS project and his words hold more weight than many. So, when Matt says HTML, CSS and images need to be licensed under the GPL, even though they are not covered by the GPL, and claims this is simply a loophole in the license, there are people who will not take time to study what the GPL actually says and who will rely on Matt’s interpretation.
In July last year just under 60% of the available themes were removed from WordPress.org because they were apparently sponsored themes. (http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=553&page=10#post-3462) 2,107 themes gone. This was discussed with the community and everyone knew what was happening and why.
That left 1737 themes (http://ma.tt/2007/07/theme-quality-and-downloads/).
The latest clean-out was not communicated, not discussed, and there has still not been any formal announcement about what is going on. There are 508 themes left.
As Matt said in his interview, he was “not talking about whether its illegal or not” (to license CSS and images differently to GPL), “all I am talking about is WordPress.org, do we want this stuff in there?”
Sure, theme designers can create their own directory, but this takes a narrow view of the big issue.
One of the things that attracts users to WordPress is the quantity of 3rd party contributions, both with plugins and themes. At the moment, there are 3,336 fewer themes in the directory than there were in July 2007. If Matt intends to apply the same rules to plugins this will mean WordPress itself becomes less useful. If he does not apply the same rules to plugins that he has done to themes then the inconsistency just creates even more confusion over what he will allow on WordPress.org
WordPress.org is the official site for an open source community that collaborates on the development of a FOSS blogging platform. Benevolent dictatorship is all very well, but decisions need to be communicated.
All that many people have asked for is for a clear statement, on WordPress.org, about what is permitted and what is not, so we can all get on the same page. To date, there still has not been an official announcement and those who want to know what is acceptable have to chase Matt across the blogosphere looking for answers.
Yup, totally agree. Thanks for commenting
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