In reply to Dan Knauss.

While support is surely the cornerstone to a successful theme shop, users simply don’t line up to buy themes based solely on this. Potential buyers may not know how great your support is until after you’ve made the sale and served them. That’s where a uniquely designed product can set you apart and pique the interest of potential buyers.

It’s becoming increasingly harder to see where the GPL stops and ownership of original design starts, and the community remains undecided. Even if it was technically legal to copy a design, why encourage users to do that instead of encouraging them to explore design and maybe learn something in the process? Simply doing it because the GPL allows it is lazy and destructive to the community.

“A business like that has nothing to worry about from students and hobbyists with no business model”

Merely submitting themes to the WordPress.org repository can be a solid business model in itself, and some treat it that way. Those themes are exposed to millions of people, and with the right themes you could amass a solid following to build a business off of. Look no further than Anders, who has served themes to ~200,000 users.