Some believe copy/pasting chunks of code is derivative. On the other hand, if your proprietary software communicates with the other software that is GPL, but uses it’s own proprietary code (and no copy/pasted parts) then it’s not derivative.

After all, both WP and Thesis use PHP… one could theoretically make Thesis to just work by talking to the MySQL database, without using WP specific functions…

Thing is, I got quite confused now, because I am in the middle of creating a plugin for WP that I want to charge for (because it’s very specific for only a small group of people with special requirements) and… does it mean I am NOT allowed to charge for it?

and…?

Does it mean anyone can re-distribute this plugin for free too?

Any ideas?

Mark

So…

Is allegedly DIYThemes NOT allow to *sell* their theme (if WP wins the case)?

In other words…

Does DIYThemes need to make Thesis available for FREE…?

And should DIYThemes let other people redistribute Thesis (also modified versions of it) for free and under the GPL license…?

If so, how is that supposed to help DIYThemes’s business…?

Not sure this makes sense, but…

Thanks

Mark

Beyond that, it seems Pearson/Thesis hold an unswayable opinion while Matt/WordPress have more facts on their side. At the core, I think a court case would go to WP but a court case wouldn’t be good for WP/Thesis/GPL in general.

There must be more to this than just the GPL licence as it makes no sense as you have laid out the facts in your post that Chris is ignoring one licence but wants his code protected under another.

I know if I was still using Thesis I would be very concerned about its future when the creator talks to the founder of WordPress with such contempt.

I still hope there can be a turn around on this current path and Chris and Matt can defuse the situation which is really hurting both brands right now.

Posterous must be ecstatic than the same week they go after WordPress with their WordPress importer that a fight breaks out withing WordPress.

My vote is for a peaceful resolution so we can support both Thesis and WordPress.

kind regards
Tony

PS.
I bought and love your book and use it a lot with my Kindle

So kinda seems obvious that Thesis should be obligated to be GPL-compliant?

http://kottke.org/04/07/my-new-policy

http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/

You pick the license you prefer.

The GPL FAQ is *not* part of the license and cannot and should not be treated as such. No one has agreed to the FAQ and since it’s not under version control, it can change by whoever and whenever without notice or review.

In short, the FAQ is decorative and can serve on as a “well, this is what people think”… but since it’s so hotly contested and debated, that isn’t even much of an argument.

The FSF is actually quite against binary blobs but the kernel maintainers are not. and they choose to accept blobs into the mainline tree. Distributions can choose to include the blobs or not.

In the other instance, while MySQL is used on the web, it’s written and compiled in C and C++, whereas WordPress and Thesis (the parts relevant to the GPL discussion anyway) are all done in PHP, a scripting language.

Honestly, I’ve always said that the biggest problem I have with the GPL is that it wasn’t written to deal with web languages. When the GPL v2 was written, Tim Berners Lee had JUST created the first browser and written the spec for HTML. Gopher was still the big standard. PHP didn’t exist. JavaScript didn’t exist. Python and Perl, as they have been expanded and created today, didn’t exist. It was a completely different time.

With GPL v3, the FSF had the chance to really address web languages, which do act very differently than traditional languages and which are going to be distributed and “run” in very, very different ways. Rather than doing that, they decided to focus on giving TiVo the middle finger and making aspects of the license so unpleasant that the Linux kernel will never be GPL 3 (as long as Torvalds has any say) and many other projects will never embrace it or accept it. The issue of web languages was largely ignored.

And it’s a shame. It’s a shame because I think that a serious discussion about open source licenses for web-based and scripting languages needs to be created and that the discussion needs to be had. Regardless of who ends up “winning” — this is a discussion that needs to happen.

I’m not at all convinced that the bitchfight over WordPress will be that case or that it will prompt any larger discussion. However, I do think that people who claim that the GPL is on such solid legal footing may overestimate the situation, especially since we’re talking about a different area of enforcement and a different definition of compilation and distribution.

Frankly, were I to start some sort of open source project (not that I would), I wouldn’t use the GPL, not because Stallman is a toejam picker, but because I don’t think it’s the appropriate license for web software.

I’ll repeat the relevant FAQ section here:

What is the difference between “mere aggregation” and “combining two modules into one program”?
Mere aggregation of two programs means putting them side by side on the same CD-ROM or hard disk. We use this term in the case where they are separate programs, not parts of a single program. In this case, if one of the programs is covered by the GPL, it has no effect on the other program.
Combining two modules means connecting them together so that they form a single larger program. If either part is covered by the GPL, the whole combination must also be released under the GPL—if you can’t, or won’t, do that, you may not combine them.
What constitutes combining two parts into one program? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).
If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.
By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.

I think the phrase “derivative work” is loaded, legally speaking. I think what we are really looking at are the GPL’s notions of a “combined work”. This isn’t exactly explicitly spelled out in the actual wording of the GPL itself, however. The FAQ entry spells it out a little more clearly, but it remains to be seen whether that will matter under a judge’s eye.