There’s a lot of great WordPress content published in the community but not all of it is featured on the Tavern. This post is an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full post. Four Great How-to Videos From Bob Dunn Bob Dunn, founder of BobWP.com,…
WordPress the open-source software project is licensed under the GPLv2. This license grants users and developers the following freedoms. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can…
There’s a lot of great WordPress content published in the community but not all of it is featured on the Tavern. This post is an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full post. Jen Mylo Moves on From Automattic Jen Mylo, formerly known as Jane…
Four months ago, Richard Best, a lawyer who maintains a blog focused on legal matters related to WordPress and open source, published a poll asking for people’s views on the reselling of commercial themes and plugins. Best is working on a 10-chapter ebook called “A Practical Guide to WordPress and the GPL.” He created the…
WordPress is licensed under the GPLv2 and the four freedoms it allows is considered to be its Bill of Rights. The four freedoms are: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. The freedom to…
We now know when Matt Mullenweg discovered Chris Pearson changed Thesis’ license from split GPL to a proprietary one. On April 1st 2014, Siobhan McKeown interviewed Matt Mullenweg for the WordPress history book. In the interview, we learn about the history of WordPress themes, the GPL, how Automattic unintentionally created the commercial theme market, why…
In a post titled “The Truth About Thesis.com,” Chris Pearson responded to the recent heated discussions about his legal battle with Automattic over the Thesis.com domain and related trademarks. His public response revives a five-year old licensing disagreement. “I think the most important place to start is by asking: Why would Automattic—a website software company…
Open source software makes up the vast majority of licensed code hosted on GitHub, as one of the primary features of the site is code sharing and collaboration. In of April 2015, GitHub reported 9.2 million users collaborating across 21.8 million repositories. For the past seven years since the site’s launch, one of the most…
In 2009-10, there was an intense debate between the co-creator of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, and the founder of DIY Themes, Chris Pearson. The debate centered on whether or not Thesis needed to be 100% GPL licensed. Thesis lifted lines of code from the core of WordPress, which some people claimed made Thesis a derivative of…
Over the weekend, I stumbled across a new resource called WP and Legal Stuff run by Richard Best, a qualified lawyer in New Zealand, England, and Wales. The site focuses on legal matters related to WordPress and open source. Recent articles include: Using the WordPress trademarks for your business, product or service The GPL and…
Varying Vagrant Vagrants 1.2.0 was released last week after nine months in development. As of VVV 1.2.0, new instances of VVV will have the database entirely contained inside the virtual machine, as opposed to previous versions where it was mapped to a persistent local location. VVV project leader Jeremy Felt recommends a full vagrant destroy…
While the GPLv2 is an open source license that offers many freedoms to do with the code as you please, those freedoms are not carried over to trademarks. Take WordPress for example. WordPress is a registered trademark overseen by the WordPress Foundation. If someone wants to redistribute WordPress as is, they can under the terms…
If you are selling WordPress themes or thinking about entering the markets, there’s been a plethora of great information published the past few weeks. Topics ranging from whether themes are a commodity to what it is you’re really purchasing when a theme is GPL Licensed. Here is a round up of articles in case you…
When I wrote about the VersionPress project and campaign last week, a major sticking point with people was whether the project would be licensed under the GPL. After a few consultation emails and deliberation, the developers have decided the plugin will be 100% GPL licensed. When we set off with VersionPress and the crowd-funding campaign…
Yesterday, we featured WP Inject, a plugin that makes it easy to insert Creative Commons licensed images into WordPress content. High quality CC-licensed images are incredibly easy to find these days. The vast majority of the collections include images that fall under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 license. While these images are fine for blogging,…