WordPress and the GPL

The WordPress blog has an inter­est­ing post up about the applic­a­bil­ity of the GPL to WordPress themes, based on an opin­ion pro­vided by the Software Freedom Law Center:

If WordPress were a coun­try, our Bill of Rights would be the GPL because it pro­tects our core free­doms. We’ve always done our best to keep WordPress​.org clean and only pro­mote things that are com­pletely com­pat­i­ble and legal with WordPress’s license. There have been some ques­tions in the com­mu­nity about whether the GPL applies to themes like we’ve always assumed. To help clar­ify this point, I reached out to the Software Freedom Law Center, the world’s pre­em­i­nent experts on the GPL, which spent time with WordPress’s code, com­mu­nity, and pro­vided us with an offi­cial legal opin­ion. One sen­tence sum­mary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, art­work and CSS may be but are not required.

via WordPress › Blog » Themes are GPL, too.

Lloyd writes at A Fool’s Wisdom that:

Talking about licens­ing really is the suck. Matt’s arti­cle became nec­es­sary lately as some com­mer­cial theme devel­op­ers have been very aggres­sive to WordPress com­mu­nity mem­bers, who have shared theme code as allowed by WordPress’s viral GPL v2 license.

It frus­trates me when I read com­mer­cial theme devel­op­ers com­plain­ing about peo­ple “steal­ing” their themes after the thou­sands of hours they have worked. They make no men­tion of the hun­dreds of thou­sands of hours oth­ers have worked on WordPress (count­ing on the  GPL pro­tect­ing their free­doms ).

via Commercial WordPress Theme’s PHP Code is GPL 2 Too.

The main point of the legal opin­ion is that any WordPress theme is so entwined with the main WordPress code as to make it a “deriv­a­tive work,” and thus sub­ject to WordPress’ copy­right and licens­ing (which is the GPL).

There has been some dis­agree­ment in the com­mu­nity about this legal opin­ion — based on the “viral” nature of the GPL — that WordPress themes also need to be GPL. The main argu­ment against seems to be based on the idea that a WordPress theme could func­tion inde­pen­dently of WordPress. If this were pos­si­ble, then it would not be an inde­pen­dent work at all.

James Vasile, who wrote the opin­ion, noted that there might be a sit­u­a­tion like this, but that it would be unlikely:

[I]magine using Wordpress to serve a sin­gle sta­tic page. You would use a Wordpress theme that does not con­tain any php but is sim­ply HTML. The HTML would look a lot like data that just passes through the PHP process to the client and does not include any blog entries or side­bar functionality.

It’s a triv­ial case that turns WordPress into a very com­pli­cated ver­sion of cat, but that theme would prob­a­bly be a sep­a­rate work.

via com­ments to CMS Themes and the GPL.

I must say that I find the legal opin­ion to be strong and defen­si­ble, and the alter­na­tive opin­ion — that themes are not deriv­a­tive works — much less con­vinc­ing based on cur­rent copy­right law. Actually, as much as I appre­ci­ate the GPL, I do not think this is nec­es­sar­ily cor­rect pub­lic pol­icy, even if it works in this spe­cific GPL case (right result, per­haps, wrong pol­icy basis). After all, if WordPress car­ried a non-​​GPL, more com­mer­cial license, then themes could be banned or con­trolled in very neg­a­tive ways — a result I would not appreciate.

To restate again, I think themes would legally be too tied to WordPress and are indeed bound to the GPL — I don’t like the law that makes it so — but I do gen­er­ally like the GPL (which under­mines tra­di­tional licens­ing, but is only pow­er­ful because of public-​​policy prob­lems with the law).

Finally, Mark Ghosh, in an arti­cle provoca­tively titled “Licensing is the vehi­cle, our users are the envi­ron­ment, writes:

In all of our vac­il­la­tions, are we get­ting away from our core philoso­phies? The free­doms that the GPL and WordPress have offered to the folks who choose to make money from WordPress, are also designed to help another, larger group of peo­ple. The peo­ple who use the software.

via weblog­tools col­lec­tion.

Indeed.