The whole wordpress GNU GPL issue is sure causing a lot of pain for some developers.

Oh, and I’m looking for a plugin to allow people to edit their own comments but so far I’ve come up empty. If anyone knows of any please drop me a line.

All of these exchanges should have been done privately, and they should have been done between myself, you, and Ben.

I am very happy to see that you have complied with the changes I originally asked for. And while I don’t like seeing the theme sold, I do agree that you guys are no within your right to do so.

With this latest change, I would like to put out an olive branch and let you know that despite how everything went down, I would like to mention the Blogging Experiment theme release on Blogging Pro, if you guys are interested.

This did bring up some very interesting and heated issues and discussions, and despite not resolving the bigger issues, I hope I can say that we have reached a conclusion to our back and forth on this whole mess.

1. If it was a pure copyright issue, the button graphics would definitely be an issue. The XHTML related to the buttons might be an issue although they’d have to jump through a lot of hoops to prove or justify that. The CSS might be copyrightable as part of the design of the pages.

Since the graphics have now been replaced in the version for sale and the XHTML in question removed, that should no longer be an issue. As several people have stated, the design differs so substantially that no one would confuse the two, so I don’t believe the CSS issue has ever been a valid one.

2. In the case of the Creative Commons license, under the Share Alike 3.0 License which Blogging Pro claims is applicable:

“This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.”

from: http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses

So commercial use is clearly allowed under the Creative Commons Share Alike license. If they did not intend to allow commercial use they could have chosen the Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license.

BTW, the phrase “license their new creations under the identical terms” replies to the terms of the Share Alike license not any additional terms that someone might want to apply.

A credit has been added to the style.css file (that’s where it goes in WordPress themes) of the for-sale version as follows:

This theme was designed by James Cook of studioJMC (http://www.studioJMC.com/) and incorporates elements from the Blogging Pro Theme by Elena G (http://blog.designdisease.com/) as well as elements from the Default WordPress theme by Michael Heilemann (http://binarybonsai.com/) and others.

That is based upon the attribution information in the Blogging Pro theme and should resolve that issue.

3. Of course if the GPL applies, as I still firmly believe, none of that makes a difference.

Speaking strictly for myself and not Blogging Experiment or Ben, I believe I am now in compliance no matter what standard is applied and I feel comfortable resuming sales of the theme when I choose to. Out of deference to the Blogging Pro folks I won’t offer the version with their button graphics.

WordPress is GPL. WordPress themes are not GPL.

Themese are designed to work with WordPress but they are not WordPress.

If I write software that works on Linux I can license that software under whatever terms I want, not just GPL.

The theme in question is a derivative work of another theme which is licensed under a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons does not mean Public Domain! If the Creative Commons License includes “no derivatives” or “share alike” clauses than this new theme can not be sold as it breaks both of the above clauses.

Even when something is licensed under the GPL you can make all the changes you want. However, once you distribute your modified version you have to include the source code.

I don’t think many people care about you stealing some javascript snippets or CSS.

So you should really get permission and maybe pay compensation regardless of licensing to the people you are deriving works of artistic nature off if you have integrity.