Matt went on record today with a 2-hour interview (http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2008/12/19/2hr-interview-with-matt-mullenweg/)

Like many others in the FOSS world, Matt appears to confuse open source with the FSF position. In the interview he repeatedly uses, "open source" when he means "free software". It appears that his interpretation of free software also means free as in price if the software is licensed under the GPL. In his interview he talks about taking commercial themes and redistributing them at no cost, without regard for the license. He even stated that, "Google around you can find any of these themes for free", thereby reinforcing the misguided view that anyone can take any theme designed for WordPress and release it.

This confusion over the meaning of "open source" and the FSF position is something the Free Software Foundation has itself been trying to clear up for years.

Matt also appears confused over other terminology, such as "commercial" and "proprietary" and ignores the fact that a commercial theme may be licensed under GPL. He is certainly not alone in that.

I personally don't think the interview will do anything to stop the GPL arguments that have been consuming the WordPress community for most of 2008. What it does do, however, is make it clear that anyone who wishes to give back to the WordPress community by developing a GPL theme must license their theme data (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and images) under the same General Public License and must not add an author link to a site that contains, supports or promotes commercial themes. WordPress.org is perfectly within its rights to stipulate this on their rules for inclusion in the theme directory.

Sadly, this debacle just adds to the vast amount of FUD surrounding the GPL and will hang around on the Net to confuse even more users of FOSS applications.

You have a dispute with Matt Mulenweg and his management of his work. You're blaming the GPL for this. You are incorrect to do so.

The GPL is keeping up just fine. It's not designed to mediate between individuals having disputes. It's designed to define how software may be distributed.

Matt Mulenweg has a particular interpretation (which I don't agree with) about derivative works, and you appear to have issue with that. Again, that's not the GPL's fault - it's a breakdown between you and Mulenweg about what's acceptable.

Stop shooting the messanger and concentrate your efforts on why you and Automattic are not communicating. Or, pack up your tent and move to another platform, as you say. It's your choice.

Let's look at what the zealots believe, and what's true:

>> I understand that the themes that are at issue are those where the author has limited the freedom of people who use them. For example, they might have stated that their credit can't be removed from the theme. Or they might have stated that the theme can't be altered in some other way.

Nope - our GPL themes are pure and simple 100% GPL. No strings attached, no added conditions, just try downloading our GPL themes and you'll see the GPL license in there along with a simple and clear readme that never tells anyone to not remove links. It's nice for people to leave them there though - these themes cost us real money to develop and a bit of credit is nice. We're not a charity, after. Neither's Automattic, funnily enough.

But that's not good enough. Instead WordPress.org and co.

Thing is, the GPL was developed a long time ago. Long before the idea of hosted applications. It was designed to avoid lock-in and price gouging. It was also designed, largely, to protect GNU OS from being made proprietary and mostly talked about compiled code.

Big surprise for you - but the GPL is deeply flawed in today's world. All the Facebook code could be GPL but I still can't easily move my data from Facebook to somewhere else. All that content I generated gets locked to them. Same applies to WordPress.com - there's an export tool, but a lot of features are lost and WordPress.com do not openly distribute some of the themes - though they do if you know where to look.

The funny thing is, if you do very fine, reliable work, there's not much money in support. Our themes are ultra-reliable, and trivial to customise - so guess what, it makes us less work. In fact, the way the GPL zealots are working actively encourages flakiness or feature loss in order to generate revenue as the projects mature.

I'm pretty hacked off with it all and am actively looking at other licenses and other platforms. Automattic is treating developers and designers with contempt and I for one am not happy about it.

(Don't forget to capitalize the P in WordPress. ;))

"Wordpress removed over 200 themes, under the pretext that they were carrying links back to their author's site, and the author's site either was offering commercial material, or even simply had links to affiliate programs!"

Actually we removed only 5-6 themes for that, the other 250ish we removed were because they were search engine spamming or claiming to be something other than GPL, which is prohibited from the directory. The vast majority we removed were very low quality and had few downloads.

"They released a free GPL theme to the world, but the GPL theme could not be used with Wordpress"

You can use any code you like with WordPress, and for any purpose you like. All that we're discussing is things we're promoting and hosting on WordPress.org, which is the project homepage.

"While many of these guys can be good, it is not a stretch of the imagination to envision that the overall quality of FOSS code is going to come crashing down."

The folks I work with on WP are some of the best developers around, which I think is attested by some of the sites that use WordPress:

http://wordpress.org/showcase/

WP is also behind WordPress.com, one of the top 30 websites in the world.