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John @donnacha The GPL, designed to fight the parasitic coders who want to take and not give back, is a perfect example of that. The GPL is an extension of copyright, and is not designed to “fight the parasitic coders”. It’s designed to promote and advance community improvement of software. It only requires that if you modify and redistribute the software, that you do so under the same terms that allowed you to do what you did. Chris and many others feel that a theme does not modify core WordPress code, and as such, his theme would not need to be distributed under the GPL. There is a very legitimate argument to be made for such a stance, and neither Chris, nor anyone else, should be penalized or deemed a parasite for taking that stance. he has, finally, come into compliance with the license, probably only because he was caught red-handed with chunks of stolen code and would have been destroyed in court People can steal GPL’d code? WordPress could still sue DIYThemes for the previous violations as I’d bet the GPL’d code was present in versions prior to 1.7, but I be surprised if that happened. Chris certainly didn’t change his license to make things go away. By changing the license, he limits his potential liability. If you want to hate on Chris because he acted immature at times, then fine, but don’t forget Matt and his behavior. And don’t hate on him simply because he would not cave to the heavy pressure exerted on the dev community by WordPress and for deciding to do what he thought was legal and in his best interest.
John
@donnacha
The GPL, designed to fight the parasitic coders who want to take and not give back, is a perfect example of that.
The GPL is an extension of copyright, and is not designed to “fight the parasitic coders”. It’s designed to promote and advance community improvement of software. It only requires that if you modify and redistribute the software, that you do so under the same terms that allowed you to do what you did. Chris and many others feel that a theme does not modify core WordPress code, and as such, his theme would not need to be distributed under the GPL. There is a very legitimate argument to be made for such a stance, and neither Chris, nor anyone else, should be penalized or deemed a parasite for taking that stance.
he has, finally, come into compliance with the license, probably only because he was caught red-handed with chunks of stolen code and would have been destroyed in court
People can steal GPL’d code? WordPress could still sue DIYThemes for the previous violations as I’d bet the GPL’d code was present in versions prior to 1.7, but I be surprised if that happened. Chris certainly didn’t change his license to make things go away. By changing the license, he limits his potential liability.
If you want to hate on Chris because he acted immature at times, then fine, but don’t forget Matt and his behavior. And don’t hate on him simply because he would not cave to the heavy pressure exerted on the dev community by WordPress and for deciding to do what he thought was legal and in his best interest.
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