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By Krishna, July 18, 2009

It is now official that WordPress themes are GPL, which creates problems for the business models of the design companies which were offering “premium” themes. A few weeks before this happened, a few premium theme developers such as Revolution decided to release their themes under the GPL and Alex King called them on it to see if they really understood what the GPL meant. Going by the comments, some don’t:

I think those of use who have GPL’ed our themes are more saddened by the fact that certain individuals are completely exploiting hundreds or in my case thousands of hours worth of development time and purposely trying to use the GPL for their immediate personal/monetary gain.

The problem, though, is that the GPL is exactly meant to do that. You can take any GPL code and redistribute it for free or even sell it, the only condition being that you pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. This is what the GPL Preamble states:

The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program–to make sure it remains free software for all its users. [...]

To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.

The GPL is about protecting freedom, not about protecting profits or intellectual property. It also makes it easier for developers to use code (as long as they share equally) and for users to distribute code without having to worry about the fine print or royalties.

Secondly, as one of the commentators stated, the producer of a GPL product like a WordPress theme has already benefited from the work of other GPL authors:

If I were to release all of your themes for free on my site, you claimed I’d be “completely exploiting thousands of hours worth of development time and purposely trying to use the GPL for their immediate personal/monetary gain.”

How is that different than the fact that you’re using thousands of hours developing the platform of WordPress for your own monetary gain?

I suppose many people are confused by the fact that money has been made on open source products, especially the big few like mySQL, Linux and WordPress. Part of this is because the GPL made no restriction on charging for free software. In theory, selling a copyable item for free doesn’t seem viable because why would you pay for something you can get for free once the first copy has been sold?

In practice, the “code” is always “free” as in zero dollars. What you really pay for is the service and the brand behind the code even if you seem to be paying for the code. Businesses have paid for separate commercial licenses for GPL products to avoid legal problems. But some assume that you can make money by simply selling GPL products, but without any service offering, that is a risky business strategy.

This kind of attitude is not restricted to the GPL. Seth Godin had a similar confusion sometime back about the Creative Commons license he was using. To his credit, he updated his post to clarify his intent, though it would have been better served if he had changed the title heading and deleted what he had written.

This is all very ironic. Many people seem to use the copyleft licenses because it apparently is cool, like supporting environmental causes, to have your code or work published under an open source license. Or they wish to benefit from the open source community. In other words, they use open source because they gain something. But God forbid, if someone else gained something by taking advantage of what the license allows them to do.

To end these double standards, people need to educate themselves about software licensing and intellectual property rights. If they cannot tolerate the freedoms that the GPL or Creative Commons gives to their users, they have the right not to use those licenses. They have the full freedom to write or pick a tighter license that explictly states what they allow. Using plain old copyright is simple enough. Or hire a lawyer.

Comments (1)

By Krishna, June 17, 2009

I changed my hosting from Blogger to a hosted instance of WordPress. I hope this does not result in a deluge of posts to your blog reader (Google Reader does that sometimes). Thanks for continuing to read my blog. If you are not yet subscribed, you can subscribe using a blog reader at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/thoughtclusters or through email at http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=thoughtclusters.

There were a couple of reasons for the move to WordPress:

1. I recently bought some space on MediaTemple, which allows you 1000 GPU (Grid Performance Units) per month. That is a lot of horsepower even if you are getting thousands of pageviews per day. All for $20 per month, which also includes PHP, mySQL, a great control panel and other goodies.
2. Once you start playing with WordPress themes and plugins, Blogger seems like a toy project compared to WordPress. There simply isn’t any comparison. I had written a post comparing Blogger and WordPress.com which may have given the impression that there is nothing much to choose between them. Perhaps it is still true about Wordpress.com, but a hosted WordPress instance is incomparable in power.

I changed the look to the Journalist theme from Lucian E Marin. Simple black-and-white design. Other themes I liked before I finalized on Journalist were iNove, Carrington and Vigilance.

The move from Blogger to WordPress was painless for the most part. Here are the things I did:

1. Changing the domain name settings. Google uses eNom for domain names hosted on Blogger. It ties that into Google Apps. So you cannot just point the eNom settings to the DNS servers of MediaTemple unless you want to also ditch the other Google Services. I guess I could move the domain registrar to MediaTemple, but I was not ready to do that yet. So the configuration is to add an A record for “www”. This may be a problem if the IP changes. So it is a short-term fix.
2. The other problem is that when you install Wordpress and then navigate to the login page, it shows you the admin password and then asks you to login. This is a problem for an existing blog which is being visited by people. One way to get around this is that before you change the domain registrar settings, change the Network Settings in Windows to use the DNS servers of the WordPress host. This will enable you to set up the blog and change the administrative login.
3. Getting WordPress to import Blogger posts and comments is a breeze. All you have to do is provide your Google login, click a few buttons and just sit back. One important thing is to make sure that you have set up the users corresponding to the Blogger authors so that you can map them correctly.
4. I learnt that the pictures do not get imported automatically into the WordPress media library. I suppose there may be some tool that does that. If not, I would have to manually upload them and edit the posts to use the images. That is going to be some work.
5. Blogger Gadgets do not get imported. So you have to set up Google Analytics, Google Webmasters, Creative Commons license, etc. manually. It is not difficult, just another thing to take care of.

Should you move to WordPress? Definitely yes. If you cannot move to a hosted installation, get a domain name and move to Wordpress.com. One day, you can make the transition to a hosted site. I did this after 3 years. So can you!