Most importantly, if themes are sold or distributed with different mixed licenses, they still can fulfill the GNU GPL. The overarching license condition and reasoning behind the Four Freedomz BS is availability of source code. This is a given with themes, in CSS and PHP snippets (unless obfuscated). Claiming license violation needs to be substantiated not based on musings and interpretations on a license you didn’t actually pick yourself. — Sorry, being blunt day.

And finally, my beef is not with what the GPL means, but with what those who adopt think it means and the fact that it is confusing and unclear on some points. If you bought a car, wouldn’t you want to be clear on what the terms of the purchase are?

Matt doesn’t enforce the license: that’s for a court of law to do. Therefore, what he thinks at this point only has value, from a legal standpoint, if a competent court determines that the terms of the GPL agree with him.

The terms of the GPL would not enter the picture until after a court decided that the themes are derivative works. Matt would not be suing because a theme violated the GPL, but because it infringes upon his copyrights. If the courts decide the theme is a derivative work then the theme’s author needs to show that he is somehow authorized to distribute the theme. If the GPL is examined at all during the case, it will be because the theme’s author has had to introduce it (and will be asked to show that he is satisfying its terms and conditions).

This is the same process that would be followed regardless of the license. It’s the same process that is followed hundreds of times every year with all manner of licenses.

If you base your work on somebody else’s copyrighted work then you need to have authorization to do so. This is not demanded by the GPL, it is demanded by copyright law. If it is not demanded by copyright law then the GPL lays no claim.

That argument of course would render any and all contracts worthless until tested in court. It would also render any and all laws worthless until tested in court. If the GPL is meaningless until someone is successfully sued, then so is every other software license out there.

And yet legal opinions are rendered by attorneys on a daily basis, and are followed by most parties.

Quite simply, the logical conclusion of this argument is that there is no law or contract other than case law. That is an incredibly silly argument to make. Certainly in the US system a substantial body of case law makes an argument more convincing, but law and contract still exist in its absence.

And lest anyone think that the GPL is untested, it has been tested and enforced in Germany (as noted above). In the US, the SCO case took the better part of a decade but has more or less ended quite conclusively against SCO (one of whose arguments was that the GPL was unenforceable; the court disagreed). And there have been many many GPL violation cases brought up, either to the point of lawsuit or not, and in all cases in the US the alleged violator has *backed down and settled out of court*. It is not an unreasonable conclusion to draw that they all realized that the GPL was enforceable, did apply, and they’d lose if they went all the way to a judicial ruling. That should tell you something.

that being said, there are some doubts about how the GPL applies for example to germany law, but still there isnt that much of a feel of uncertainty in germany (actually IIRC the GPL was once enforced in germany). so i think when discussing topics like this (the merit of CLA’s is a similar topic) probably requires clarifying on what continent of the world one lives.

The biggest problem with this debate is that it has shown how many ill mannered folks there is in the community of WordPress.

The second biggest problem is the attitude that there is only one correct interpretation of the license and if you don’t agree with that interpretation you’re breaking the law.

It’s also weird seeing all this excitement over Thesis… I only used it once, and that was because of a client who fancied himself a tekkie and wanted to use it. I say sure, you want it you pay for it and it’s yours. Do real developers use Thesis at all??