Wordpress vs. Thesis : concrete5 says “the GPL is stupid”
by Franz
Wow. If you haven’t heard the drama, you should watch this video. In short, a premium theme developer (DYITthemes) which sells a wordpress theme named Thesis does not release it under the GPL license.
Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder and leader of Wordpress is calling him out on it; “when you violate someone’s license it is breaking the law. It’s a definition of breaking the law.”
Chris Pearson says he doesn’t have to release his theme under the GPL “They are not the highest authority node up on the tree that gets to decide everything that happens underneath them.”
You can watch them get all sassy with each other for an hour, if you want. Plenty of people have and some of them are asking for our view on it.
concrete5 is a competitor to Wordpress in ways, and we had to choose a license when we started as well. We specifically did NOT choose the GPL for exactly this reason. Here’s how we see it…
1) Much of this is about distribution. Our understanding of this is pretty simple:
If Thesis is distributed as a stand alone download that /includes/ a copy of Wordpress, then Chris is legally wrong. If you distribute GPL software, everything you add to it has to be GPL compatible. Clear and simple, period.
If Thesis is distributed on its own, I think Chris might have an argument to make. It’s easy to think “hey this does nothing without Wordpress, it is dependent on it, it needs to honor whatever legal requirements Wordpress comes up with” but I don’t think that’s technically true. The GPL is about the copying and distribution of software and it doesn’t really cover this with a tremendous amount of clarity. There’s plenty of examples that would have been a lot more interesting to discuss than what they did in the interview. For example, just because you’ve written software that runs on Linux doesn’t mean it has to be GPL. If you distribute Linux WITH your software as a single solution it does however. How’s that for weird?
Regardless, Chris would have a much better high ground to stand on if Thesis actually worked with different CMS backends – much the way that C# application you wrote for linux could also run on a variety of other operating systems.
2) Matt seems like an awful nice guy, and Pearson comes off like a total douche in this interview. I’ve never met either, I’m sure they’re both awesome, I’m just saying after losing an hour to listening to this crap there’s a pretty clear answer for who I’d like to have a beer with. That’s a tremendous shame because frankly Chris is the underdog here trying to build and maintain a nice small business and Wordpress is the big player trying to squash entrepreneurialism. Regardless, Matt comes off as the hero cause he’s a nice guy and Chris comes off poorly because of the way he makes his arguments. Important lessons there, it’s probably time for us to do a better job stripping drupal references from our customer testimonials. 
3) Wow you can tell the difference that some funding makes. Let me just be clear about what I believe to be the real motivators here, please correct me if I’m mis-informed: Wordpress Automattic has raised over $40m in venture capital. They have over 25 million blogs out there, and fundamentally they are in the content business. They don’t make their real money by selling wordpress, or taking a cut of marketplace add-ons, or offering paid hosting, or any of the stuff we do, they make their money on content. The advertising value on wordpress.com is huge. You have 25 million individuals using your platform to create content, you can monetize that in big ways. That’s why wordpress may be frequently used as a CMS to build some corporate site, but you’ll never see their core team drop features that help my wife (who has an active wordpress blog about DIY sewing), in favor of features that make some corporate extranet easier to run. Matt doesn’t have to worry about making payroll in two weeks, he has to worry about balancing ads and content on Wordpress.com so my wife keeps going there to find other cool sewing blogs she wants to cross link to. Wordpress’s real competitors are Twitter, Facebook, Google – they’re in that big business of re-inventing media. That’s why the GPL makes sense to them. The more wordpress is out there, the better for wordpress, as long as it’s called Wordpress.
Chris on the other hand is selling a Theme that helps turn Wordpress into a application that does something more. Again I’m just guessing here, but it wouldn’t shock me at all to hear Chris’s company is self funded, profitable, and it hasn’t been easy to get there. The idea of having a product that you sell at $50 a pop being distributed for free or even worse sold for $49 somewhere else has to make him physically sick. The carrot of “but people will want you for support” is a pretty grim answer.
I’m not arguing that Matt has an easy life and Chris doesn’t. Certainly the stress of looking Phil Black in the eye and saying “yes your $40m will turn into $800 million, sir” can’t be fun. I’m just saying the two challenges are very different and you can read the distinction in motivation from just the tone of their voices alone.
4) The GPL is stupid, and O’Reilly did us all a tremendous disservice when he came up with “open source”. Yeah I said it, so blah! When I was a developer growing up in the 80’s, we had licenses that actually meant what they said. If you wanted to just give something away, you called it Freeware. If you wanted to save some money on sales but still own your software, you called it Shareware or Crippleware depending on if you offered a fully functional copy with additional features or if you did something like disable save. These labels came from the DIY software world where entrepreneurs could start successful businesses cheap by distributing stuff on BBS’s. (go look up Apogee Games). Meanwhile there were any number of “big” projects that were being distributed under licenses that made sense for schools and huge corporate problems. NASA develops some standard and wants to share it with the world, how do they do that? Several big software vendors see value in a piece of software existing, but not being “owned” by any commercial entity, how do they do that? Everyone wrote their own license and while it was confusing, it worked. Then in the late 90’s the successful technical book publisher O’Reilly came along and dubbed everything I’ve listed as “Open Source” for the benefit of the media which was having a hard time understanding how Linux could compete with Windows. Well that’s cool and all, certainly having concepts that everyone can understand in a word is great, but clearly we aren’t really there. Confusion abounds. People talk about “free beer vs. free speech” all the time, it sounds like a broken record. Any one with half a brain knows that nothing worth having in life is truly free (in cost), yet we also agree that the idea buying a car with the hood welded shut sounds like getting screwed. The goal to provide some clarity across all the different types of licenses that software was released under by calling half “open source” and the other half “commercial” has utterly failed.
5) You say you want freedom? Then the GPL isn’t for you. It is not “freedom” to force people who extend your software to honor ANYTHING you say. I’m not saying it isn’t a good business idea, I imagine it may frequently be a great business idea, but it’s not “freedom” so don’t try to take the moral high ground. You’re limiting people and it doesn’t matter that the perceived motivation of your limit is to enforce further freedom. Freedom doesn’t work that way, but proponents of the GPL seem to think it needs protection. Here’s how we see it:
If you’re for the GPL, you believe freedom is a fragile flower that has to be protected. “This started as free, we’re going to make sure it says free with all our impressive powers.”
If you’re against the GPL, you believe freedom is a force of nature. It may not look that powerful at a glance, but it’s gonna win in the end. It’s like entropy. It exists, it will win. It doesn’t need your help, all it needs is your awareness and faith, and sooner or later it’ll come out on top.
Freedom is the MIT license which to paraphrase in three words says : “Don’t sue us”. If your goal really is to give something away for no cost and have the world be “free” to do whatever it wants with it, that’s all you need. Limit the creators exposure to liability, which would limit their own freedom, and you’ve made it “free.” Of course if you do that you run the risk of someone taking your software packing it up and screwing you over in any number of ways, but no one said freedom was easy.
These issues with the GPL are not new, and it’s sad to see this play out yet again. Frankly I like to think that any legal document’s job is to create clarity, and whatever your view may be, its clear the GPL is pretty gray in spots. In some ways, I hope this does go to court so we can all get a clear answer on how this thing is supposed to work.
Meanwhile if you want to be part of something that is free, and is eager to be free in a simple understandable way, you should be developing stuff for concrete5.
UPDATE : Orrrrr I’m completely wrong.
As more debate continues in IRC and other forums a point has come up that we didn’t address in the original post. Thesis uses wordpress’s theme engine and that includes any number of lines of code that wordpress wrote. Clearly that is their work, covered by their license, and Thesis is a derivative of it. THAT being the case, he very well may be violating the GPL. What gets interesting there is where is the line for that not being derivative? If he just goes through and renames all the functions and variables but it functions the same way, is that new work? What if he changes some logic too, for loops become while loops, etc. Where is the line where something is no longer derivative but a new thing?
What if Thesis makes an abstraction layer from scratch that does nothing but give them some differently named hooks to the same stuff, and then releases THAT abstraction layer LGPL and continues to sell their theme? That sounds legal, annoyingly stupid but legal.
Regardless the fact that everyone’s so confused about this does bring serious questions to the fore on the worth of GPL and what ‘freedom’ means. I hope we find out.
A very interesting read. I found the link via twitter and was interested in what you had to write. It’s also nice to see this is a WordPress installation you are using.
BTW, WordPress.com does offer “premium” paid services and other VIP related items, and although their is advertising on the dot-com sites it is rarely seen. The WordPress.org web site and the software available from there are the ones involved in this “debate”.
Edward Caissie
16 Jul 10 at 12:54 pm
Yup, they have any number of revenue streams/options but it is my understanding that while their ads on the dot-com sites maybe rarely seen, that scale there is what pays the bills and keep investors excited. Here’s an article on some of the ways they make money:
http://www.labnol.org/internet/blogging/how-wordpress-makes-money/7576/
Now look at that list and pretend you’re an investor with millions to spend. Its good to be able to say you have a number of diverse revenue streams, but really its got to be the advertising that is appealing.. Why?
1) Services don’t scale well. You have to hire more people and not mess things up as you grow, so that’s unappealing to investors. Investors want a money making machine – put more investment in, get more dollars out. Services ads a lot of risk to that equation and is a backup plan at best. That means the VIP service, the paid support area, and any consulting they offer can’t be the sweet stuff.
2) Hosting is a commodity. VC’s used to invest in hosting companies but then a lot of consolidation happened and now its a race to the bottom. The idea that wordpress could generate a valuation in the billion dollar area on people paying to map a domain to their blog is hard to swallow, especially as the app is GPL and there’s no reason that I couldn’t setup a slightly better deal and compete. No protection == bad investment.
3) Referrals – wordpress suggests places that you might host your blog and they do get affiliate kickbacks for that. No doubt a great way to cover some bills but hard to see this as a business model.
4) Add-ons. This is the most believable out of the options… Akismet costs money to some. Poll Daddy can cost money.. etc. The “Freemium” idea has some weight and was particularly popular when wordpress was raising money, but still – it seems to me like there are a lot more profitable pieces of software you could write..
Here’s the thing – the audience has always been and continues to be consumer focused. Sure there’s the VIP stuff, but since that’s invite only it is clearly there to fill a need that emerged. It’s not like you see “Wordpress Enterprise” being released for 8k/year with a bunch of workflow tools for the corporation. Wordpress is first and foremost a blogging platform and while its used for so much more, that really seems to be what they want to do and continue to focus.
This means its B2C not B2B.
Generally if you’re going to make piles of money on B2C stuff, you’re either talking infrastructure we all need (phone, fridge, etc) or you’re talking advertising. Worked for google. I only brought it up because while yes there is wordpress.org and .com, no, they are not separate companies with their own motivations. I just think that the issues Matt and Chris lose sleep over are probably completely different and that’s important in understanding their disagreement.
Franz
16 Jul 10 at 1:33 pm
I don’t really follow this stuff to closely. It kinda makes my head hurt. But for all the complaints about GPL, aren’t most of those issues solved with the LGDP License? From my reading (more like skimming) it seems like a nice step inbetween the no-commerical style GPL and the do-anything-with-it MIT license.
“Generally, the GNU Lesser GPL is meant for cases where one wishes to insure freedom in the existing work, but not control what happens in a derived or “aggregate work”, one assumes made by others.”
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/1681
Tony
16 Jul 10 at 2:09 pm
Point 3 is inaccurate.
WordPress itself is not funded, it is open source and community driven.
On the other hand, WordPress.com is a commercial product owned and operated by Automattic, which is funded.
Enjoy your weekend.
Dre
Dre
16 Jul 10 at 8:34 pm
I didn’t say wordpress was self funded. I said my guess was that DIYthemes was self funded.
By self funded I mean no one is cutting a check to make sure the core development continues. The revenue your business makes pays the bills your business incurs to grow.
I understand the difference between wordpress.com & .org. I also understand that there are developers who have contributed their time and energy to wordpress with the understanding that the GPL is part of it, and I see how that can drive motivation. The contributions of open source developers to wordpress for free are no doubt a key part of its success.
That being said, you can’t honestly think that Matt and gang aren’t worried about creating a return on the investment in wordpress.com. Moreover as there isn’t an enterprise vs. lite type version or license structure here between the funded and open source contributions, I fail to see how your comment applies.
My point with the original post #3 is that Matt is worried about some big ass problems, and Chris is worried about getting paid tomorrow. I believe that is accurate. It was actually just an aside regarding posturing on that painful interview.
The point remains, Chris is probably in the wrong today, and it’s unfortunate that the GPL creates this confusion instead of making things clear as good legal documents should.
best
-frz
Franz
16 Jul 10 at 9:10 pm
I could spill a bunch of words on a response, but the quick retort to this:
Is to say:
Yes. The GPL gives developers who extend GPL software fewer rights than the MIT license does. If you don’t like that as a developer, don’t extend WordPress (or Joomla or Drupal or MTOS or Textpattern — all GPL). That is the license, and we cannot change it, even if we wanted to.
Mark Jaquith
16 Jul 10 at 9:12 pm
You’re not following me on this boss. Although I don’t agree, you’re entitled to your opinion. I am not arguing what you’ve stated.
I am however arguing your statement in point number three:
“Wordpress has raised over $40m in venture capital. They have over 25 million blogs out there, and fundamentally they are in the content business”
That is simply inaccurate. Automattic has raised venture capital, not WordPress. Automattic happens to own WordPress.com which is a site that uses WordPress for commercial purposes and has xx million blogs being hosted on the service.
At the end of the day, frz, you’re kind of cool. I think I’d like to chat some more, gonna follow you on Twitter
Dre
16 Jul 10 at 9:21 pm
Thanks Dre,
check out http://concrete5.org you’ll like it.
Regardless – Automattic’s ownership of wordpress (the brand) and leadership of the project is obviously a huge part of their valuation.. And it doesn’t have any impact on the argument I’m making: the GPL was designed to, and effectively does, make it difficult to sell access to software. I’m not saying that all software should or shouldn’t be free (as in dollars, or speech) I’m just saying if you want to get all high and mighty about “freedom,” as GPL proponents (including Matt) tend to do, don’t start making up restrictions to protect it. That’s akin to anti-flag burning legislation: we probably all agree it’s wrong or at least very crass to burn the flag, but making it illegal is an affront to the protections its meant to represent.
In my view, the GPL makes some weird very developer-centric/anti-business assumptions. To just go ahead and stick my foot full on in my mouth:
GPL = Hi, I’m a developer who has learned a lot from looking at other people’s code. I’ve got something new, and I want other people to learn from it and add to it. That’d be awesome. I don’t want IBM/APPLE/MICROSOFT/EVIL EMPIRE to screw me over and make a lot of money with it though! That’d suck! Okay how about this, you can do what you want with it except if you show/give/sell it to anyone you have to give it to everyone.
MIT = Don’t sue me. Go anarchy!
There’s huge failings with both. concrete5 is MIT, so I’m basically at the mercy of my community. I can’t pull the strings Matt is now, for better or worse. In fact, I know full well that people rebrand concrete5 as their own agency tools and sell it as part of their own package deals. My view is that’s their freedom to exercise. What goes around comes around and I hope they contribute in some new and exiciting way I can’t predict. That’s what’s cool about /real/ freedom -it’s unknown. You don’t control it.
Conversely, the GPL makes it damn near impossible for some people to engage with your product who might be really valuable to the project in any number of ways. It limits what you can do from a business prospective later, and if you’re building something big with investors and exit strategies involved, that can be a real issue. No it doesn’t explicitly forbid you from selling software, but you have no way to control what happens to that software once you’ve sold a single copy. You’d have to be insane or just hopeful to expect to not get your wares resold by others for less in the big picture.
I see places where both make sense, and I see places where commercial software makes sense too. I do however think the GPL is very easily misunderstood. I think a lot of open source software ends up GPL because that “seems like the thing everyone does,” which is a shame.
Franz
16 Jul 10 at 9:43 pm
From your first comment response you appear to have written at length how a GPL-licenced product does provide for a very viable business model which seems to contradict the title of the post … and as I am reading it, simply argues in favor of its use.
Carry on …
Edward Caissie
17 Jul 10 at 8:03 am
Interesting post. Thanks for sharing your opinion about licenses in the open source world.
ron
Ron
17 Jul 10 at 9:35 pm
That’s beautiful. It’s possibly a bit too beautiful for me to believe in wholeheartedly, but yeah. Well said.
that girl again
18 Jul 10 at 6:16 pm
I listened to the talk and didn’t like anything any of both said. From Chris perspective it would look like the following to me. First thing that happend: People stole Chris Software and sold it as their own. Second: People like Justin Tadlock or Ian Stewart make similar themes for free (read on thematic how that guy hates premium themes and people who make a living from that). Third: Automattic is going to ruin much of his credability and therefore of his buisness.
It’s hard to be Chris now…
K
19 Jul 10 at 12:18 pm
Simple fact: Thesis runs on WordPress. It uses WordPress, therefore it links with it. GPL discusses linking and calls that a derivative work, therefore themes should be GPL.
So, yes, Chris is in violation and should adhere to the license. It doesn’t matter if you are for or against the GPL. GPL is the license. Adhere to it, or use something else.
If WordPress were LGPL or had an exception clause for plugins and themes, it would be another matter, but unfortunately it’s not.
I see some people use the Linux kernel and code running on it as an argument for seperation between themes and Wordpress core. That’s stupid. Programs running on a kernel do not link with it, and therefore are exempt. Wordpress themes do link in Wordpress functionality and code through includes, so therefore they are in the scope of the license.
IANAL, but I *am* a developer that has to deal with licensing issues every once in a while.
Coolvibe
23 Jul 10 at 1:41 am
I agree in general.. I’m not so sure the operating system/application argument is “stupid,” but I agree it really only holds weight if Thesis worked with other CMS’s.. Programs running on an operating system can certainly depend on other programs in that OS, or the OS itself, so whatever you mean by “link” I think is a bit thin.. But yes I do agree since Thesis was clearly designed to be an extension of wordpress and nothing else it’s pretty hard to make this argument stick.
Franz
30 Jul 10 at 3:25 pm