In reply to Mike McAlister.

This is the real issue, isn't it:

It’s becoming increasingly harder to see where the GPL stops and ownership of original design starts, and the community remains undecided.

I don't believe the motives of every person who allegedly creates or uses "unoriginal" designs can be so easily judged as "lazy and destructive to the community," whatever that means. This is really just about one person now. You seem to believe Anders crossed a line that made his work more derivative than original in some key respects. Since he presents himself as a WordPress designer/developer and has distributed his work for free and received a lot of praise, this probably feels like you're being ripped off creatively and potentially financially. I get that, but nobody has actually shown that any "unoriginality" in this case involves derivative code and/or graphic design. What line was crossed?

Maybe some type of common standard can be worked out through focused, civil dialogue about actual scenarios like this. Is there a real problem? If so, what is the solution? Developing broad consensus is probably the only path to a solution. Even if a legal answer is achievable, it can only be achieved by someone spending a lot of time and money on it. That doesn't happen much in the open source world; if you have to go that far does it make sense to be using an open source license at all?

My point about business models was not that 200k downloads of a free theme can't be grown into a business -- it can. Maybe Anders will do that, maybe he won't. For now there is no business directly connected to supporting his themes and the people who use it. So he's not competing with anyone who does that, unless they aren't marketing themselves as valuable long-term support partners and instead communicate the idea that they are selling a (non-proprietary) theme product just like any other.