Museum Themes | Fine Art WordPress Themes by Arcane Palette Creative Design

Last night, I spent some time reading about the GNU Public License (GPL).  There’s been a rich and heated debate for years about how the GPL applies to “premium” (generally defined as commercial, for profit, or otherwise non-free) themes and/or how it doesn’t apply/shouldn’t apply/doesn’t matter.  At the heart of the argument is this:

1. WordPress is free.  Free as in “free beer” and free as in “free speech”.  You can download WordPress for free, you are free to make changes to the core software, install whatever themes or plugins you like, use it for any purpose you wish, or create new themes or new plugins for it for free (or for profit, but more on that later).
2. Themes take a lot of hard work.  There’s a lot of free themes available (a plethora, in fact), but if there wasn’t a market for “premium” themes — non-free themes that often include support, advanced customization features, custom code, etc — companies like StudioPress, WooThemes and DIY Themes (the makers of Thesis) wouldn’t exist.
3. Designers and developers — understandably — want to protect their intellectual property.  In the case of a download that can easily be transferred to multiple computers (and, potentially, multiple computer owners), the ownership of their intellectual property is one of the few things they can really lay claim to and there’s very little they can do (other than exclude support and publicly criticize) if someone copies their theme or uses it in a way that they don’t approve of.  It’s precisely the easy transference of  digital files that gets the RIAA all bothered about piracy: it’s really easy to copy an mp3 or a zip file from one computer (and therefore from one person) — who may have actually paid for said file — to another (who probably didn’t).

But here’s the key element: WordPress is released under the GPL, and, as a component of the WordPress software — like it or not — by the terms of the GNU Public License itself, your theme is also under the GPL.

Here’s the difference between open source and closed source: open source means everything in #1 above — you can take the code, change it, use it however you want, and put it back.  You can even sell it.  In fact, the GNU Public License actually specifies that you can — if you so desired — take something, change absolutely nothing at all, and sell it (so long as the you include a copy of the GPL in the copy you’re selling).  So I could take WordPress software — which is free as in beer — and then sell it to someone else.  I wouldn’t, of course, that’s kind of dumb, and, if anyone bought it, it would essentially be taking advantage of the fact that they didn’t realize they could get it for free (probably).  The point is that the GPL is not saying you can’t sell your stuff.  There are companies selling open source software — or extensions of open source software — all over the place; Red Hat Linux is one example, Joomla!’s commercial themes is another.  What the GPL is saying you can’t control what people do with your stuff.

Closed source software, on the other hand, disallows tinkering.  It means that, while you may own a copy of the software (or in the case of non-GPL WordPress themes, the source code), you really only own a license to use said software, and are subject to all sorts of rules and requirements about how you can use it.  Let’s use Microsoft Word as an example; you purchase a copy of Word.  You install it on your system.  You can’t change the software to, say, make it more visually appealing (not outside the confines of what’s built in, anyway).  You can’t add functions to make it behave differently.  You can’t get into the code to see how it works for purely educational or research purposes.  You can’t get into the code, period, since you’re given an executable and not the original source.  Let’s take another example: Google Apps.  I can use Google Docs absolutely free.  What I can’t do is take the Google Apps software and make it work on a computer or device that is completely disconnected from the net.  I can’t customize how it works.  I can’t add features.  I have, literally, no control at all over the software since the software resides on Google’s computers, not mine.  In fact, I don’t even have direct access to the data that I create with the software since it’s stored on Google’s servers!  If Google lost my data, I’d be completely at their mercy with no way of getting it back.

Open source encourages a rich interaction of users, designers and developers working together to make the software better.  Closed source may allow that in certain contexts (such as a developer preview or public beta) but, on the whole, excludes a wider community involvement and potentially alienates tinkerers who would otherwise have been able to learn from and contribute to the project.

What I decided last night was: why are we even having this discussion?

I mean, if we can take WordPress, a platform we love working with and designing for, and build custom themes for individuals or a wider audience through our Museum Themes and make a living from it, why fight it?  Why say you can’t use the software in this or that way?  I understand protecting your work, and I understand that, from a legal standpoint, there isn’t really all that much you can do to a theme developer who decides to release their software under a license that is not compatible with the GPL because almost anything a theme designer does can fall under the umbrella of “fair use”.  I just think it’s a little counter-productive.  It’s like taking the WordPress software and selling it.  Sure, those themes are probably great to use and they won’t disappear anytime soon, and I don’t think the folks that make them are “evil.”  I just think maybe they’re a little lame.

We will never tell you what you can or can’t do with our themes.  And, if you purchased them from this site, we’ll even help you do what you want to do.  You can read more about our stand on free software and the GNU Public License on our GPL page and you can find us, along with many other theme developers, on WordPress’s own Commercially Supported GPL Themes page in the Themes Directory.