Jul 18, 2010
No More Thesis
In the past week; a ‘debate’ has been raging between WordPress (chiefly @photomatt) and the developer of the well known Thesis theme, Chris Pearson (@pearsonified), about whether the Thesis theme, being a derivative of WordPress, must follow the same GPL-2 licensing. Legally, because Thesis contains code from WordPress itself (and runs as part of WordPress) the WordPress people say it should be, and I agree.
However, Chris Pearson believes himself exempt from these licenses, and refuses to license the theme under GPL-2 (which would make it open source) – presumably for income protection reasons (although several other premium theme producers have gone GPL and not looked back).
For this reason, I’m taking the Thesis theme (that I bought) down from my blog, and for the time being I will use the Twenty-Ten theme – until I sufficiently develop the new design I’ve been planning anyway. My understanding of or involvement in GPL is very limited indeed, but having read some choice quotes from a conversation between Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg, I was astounded by the arrogance of Pearson, and the argument presented by the WordPress team is sound. Thus, he has lost my support.
As it is, I love the Twenty-Ten theme, and if I didn’t want to have my own custom layout and design, I might have stuck with it.
