The problem with this is that there is an actual legal GPL license but also what is referred to as the "spirit" of GPL.

WTF "spirit" is comes down to whatever the founder wants it to be, in this case Matt has decided to target developers instead of addressing the issue with Envato or the community. It has created a confusing situation with good people stuck in the middle.

Why was Jake Caputo singled out, several WordCamp speakers and even core contributors have items on Envato. Are developers going to have to submit under pseudonyms so they can make a living?

Envato itself sponsors the WordPress community summit (and past wordcamps). Do they not see this as a mixed signal?

Who exactly is behind the elusive wordpress.org foundation, is it a private foundation run only by Matt himself?

How are the foundation goals not polluted by having the same director of the closed source wordpress.com (who also sell premium themes but in the context of a "service").

Why does the "spirit" of GPL apply to a large company and not me, for example I can copyright my images/graphics in a WordPress theme and still comply with the license, but Envato can't?

Is the line drawn when only when a theme is distributed? What about all the theme shops that have non GPL creative work in them?

Is Wordpress.com exempt because it is a service, what is preventing Envato or anyone else from starting it's own split-license theme "service". What exactly is the difference between a theme service and a theme distributor?

ps. The original article and discussion is here: http://www.designcrumbs.com/automatically-blackballed

Slightly inaccurate article - I've been following the discussion to some extent, and it's not that ThemeForest developers/sellers are banned from attending WordCamps, it's that they're banned from presenting, volunteering, or sponsoring.

Basically it's a GPL dispute - ThemeForest themes are not fully GPL (they GPL the PHP, but not CSS, etc.), and the WordPress.org folks are against that.

I'm not going to get into whether they think that this stance is legally wrong or whether it's just that they don't want to offer a venue and what might be perceived by some as endorsement or official sanction, because I don't know and I'm not sure that everyone involved does either. I do think that (from what I've heard) the way the WordPress Foundation has approached it is a bit heavy-handed.

This is the kind of stuff that makes commercial companies fearful of GPL software. It's not the disagreement that is the serious issue, but the fact that this legal document is completely unclear as to how it's supposed to work (and the LGPL is even more frighteningly uninterpretable).

Why isn't the WordPress Foundation up in arms over WordPress.com? They sell commercial themes[1] that I can't seem to find GPL copies of.

Are they turning a blind eye to the company that writes the checks for the WordPress Foundation, or has a special exemption been carved out for them?

1. http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/sort/premium/

I try to ignore these things because the GPL generally just infuriates me, but do themes seriously count as derivative works for the purpose of GPL licensing?

So I've read this and I'm unclear as to why Envato and not the other marketplaces and commercial theme shops?

What's the best license advice if you do want commercial organisations to be able to use your code without ambiguity?

I'm looking to open-source a few bits of code soon, and actively want commercial entities to not have to worry about using them, but am not sure what to go with.

So maybe either Wordpress.org needs to a) sell the next version of Wordpress and see how many users are left or b) somehow disallow commercial themes by tightening / changing licensing and then see how many users are left...

The WordPress ecosystem is increasingly hostile to commercial developers.

So WP.org says that all files of a theme or plugin need to be GPL since they're building on top of a GPL'ed piece of software even though this theme or plugin might not use any of the original GPL code.

Then how does this work for content you put in a WP website? You're using the database, of which the layout can be considered an interface. Should all the content be GPL'ed as well? And how does that work if your theme uses another OS project, say Bootstrap (which is an Apache licence)?

It sounds like they are following the letter of the GPL but not the spirit. By licensing the PHP under GPL they are complying, but by licensing the CSS and image assets under a restrictive license they are activity trying to hinder the PHP from being useful if it were distributed. As the GPL is designed to do.

Did they really understand the GPL when they built their business on it?

I get the PHP side of things, but I am not sure how an original CSS file would fall under the linking or derived provision of the GPL.

The title is a little bit "link-baity".

People who are selling plugins or themes on Envato are banned from being a speaker or even volunteering. Envato members can still attend the gathering.

I had a brief discussion with Matt in the comments on the source (http://www.designcrumbs.com/automatically-blackballed#commen...) and tried to get him to explain why a split-license was bad. Here is a quote:

'While legally you can make a technical argument that in a theme the PHP, CSS, JS, and images are separate things, from the point of view of a user they make up a single unit of usefulness, one “thing.” Users intuitively understand this, just like it’d be strange to have a car you could drive anywhere, but you had to remove the wheels if you went outside a certain area (the so-called “split license”). Most theme authors and businesses in the WP community also understand this, in fact all of the theme shops on the commercial themes page and many of the most successful including WooThemes and StudioPress sell 100% GPL themes that protect all the rights of their users, and have been extremely successful doing so.

It’s an author and developer’s choice to license all their code under the GPL, and it’s our choice to only promote, accept sponsorship, and accept speaking proposals from people who do so. It’s not a personal thing, and the guidelines apply equally to everyone, and if someone who broke the guidelines in the past stopped tomorrow there would be no hard feelings (it’s not a blackball, which implies permanent exclusion, it’s just part of the social mores of our community).'

Does this remind you of anything?

Greater good, comply and you'll be OK, free == freedom for everyone, etc.

I really want to give Matt and the foundation a benefit of the doubt here, but they are making it very difficult.

I followed up with a question about the WP logo, which is bundled in the WP.org download but protected.

'The GPL is a license granted under copyright law, which is separate from a trademark, which WordPress and its logo are. It’s totally allowed by the software license for someone to take the software and make a hosting service, they just have to have their own name for it, like Edublogs. (Some OS communities consider trademark restrictions too much as well, which is why there’s a fork of Firefox called “Iceweasel” included in Debian.) In addition to the guidelines on the Foundation site, having the trademark also gives us a tool to take down phishing sites that target WordPress.org users, or people who set up theme directories at similar-to-WordPress domains where every download includes a malware backdoor. There are many hundreds of these per year.'

It seems there are plenty of loopholes when they want them to exist. What I want to know is - what can I do, as a plugin and theme author, to ensure I am properly paid for my work?