Thesis Goes Split Licensed – Hell Freezes Over

Yesterday was a great day for the WordPress community as Chris Pearson announced that the license for Thesis would be changed so that the PHP would fall under the GPL while the images, CSS, and other stuff would be licensed under something else. While this is not WordPress.org GPL worthy, it is kosher with the license itself and at this point, that’s all that matters. There are a ton of posts all across the community talking about the subject of Thesis, Chris Pearson, Matt Mullenweg, and the GPL but this one by Jolie O’ Dell of Mashable does a great job of summarizing the events that lead up to the split license for Thesis. For further reading and it’s a long post, I suggest this post that talks about the leadership role of Matt during this entire escapade.

It’s evident by this tweet that he simply doesn’t ‘get it‘ and most likely never will because ego or something else blinds the man from reality. What I don’t like is the simple fact that it’s just not right, to create a piece of work that ties into a free and open platform with millions of users and it’s licensed in a way that takes away the very freedoms users of that software have been granted thanks to the GPL license. Developers for WordPress should really get a grasp of the basic concepts of the license that WordPress has and if they don’t like it, develop for a platform that has a license that conforms to their thoughts, beliefs, or way they want to do things. WordPress is GPLv2 and it’s never going to change so they can either go with the flow or find some other platform to work on. It’s aggravating to me to think that going against the GPL within the WordPress community makes any kind of business sense at all but if you develop a decent product, have great marketing along with good support and a naive userbase who doesn’t know jack about licenses and the freedoms granted with the GPL, I guess you can get by for awhile.

So, congratulations to Thesis for coming into the realm of sanity with a split license model but as far as I’m concerned, the theme doesn’t exist and my feelings for the individual have not changed either.