Wordpress Theme Designer Switches CC to GPL Licenses
April 20th, 2007WPDesigner has decided to switch all their free wordpress themes from the Creative Commons ShareALike Attribution license to the GPL license. This is an interesting move, since GPL allows exceptional freedom to modify and distribute.
He had opted for Creative Commons and required a link-back to discourage people who ripped-off his themes, repackaged them, and put them up for downloading on their own sites and tried to get exposure on places like the Theme Viewer. Now he has switched to GPL -
“In conclusion, I decided that CC and requiring a link back, just to protect myself from rip-off designers, isn’t the way to solve things. And whatever I do to discourage rip-offs should NOT affect the rest of my theme users.”
This supports the free spirit of Wordpress community that benefits everyone. However, most wordpress theme designers require you to keep a “Designed by ABCD” linkback at the footer bottom to credit their work (which is very fair). While more options are being explored for sponsored wordpress themes, with paid text links at the bottom, it has raised some issues. Will more WP designers switch from CC to GPL is uncertain.
You can download some beautiful free WordPress themes by WPdesigner, now under GPL!
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thanks.
I think all WP theme designers should release their theme as GPL, because WP is GPL and afaik, all WP theme using WP library. so, there’s no excuse not to release these theme under GPL.
congrat, now you know GPL better than others.
I just went through this debate within my own head and decided to release all of my themes as GPL on the same principles. It hasn’t hurt my bottom line – most people are courteous enough to ask me if they can remove the link anyway, and some have pointed traffic and business my way. That’s what open source is all about.