Another Company Goes 100% GPL

Spectacu.la, a premium WordPress theme company has announced on their corporate blog today that they have decided to abide by the GPL 100%. You may remember Spectacu.la from a few months ago as it was Dave Coveney who spoke out against 200 themes being removed from the theme repository, one of which was produced by his company. Of course, this lead to many more people jumping on the bandwagon to discuss the GPL and the end result is that now, no theme whatsoever that goes against the license will be hosted on the repository.

James Whitehead who published the post on the corporate blog discusses why they had to change their model.

On the upside, GPL can lead to a larger market share. It’s also very tolerant of SaaS. Consequently we have two plans. One is to run this as a paid WordPress and Spectacu.la theme forum, where you can get help and assistance, and the other is to run a WordPress service for a particular niche we’ve been eying up.

Peter Westwood congratulated the team for abiding 100% with the GPL via Twitter:

@davecoveney Congratulations. The right decision! #wordpress #gpl #payforsupportnotcodeabout

Also as part of the announcement, the company plans on giving two years of membership access to everyone who has joined from when they first launched up until the present. That is a pretty cool deal, especially for those who invested in them during their initial launch. Congrats to David and team for finding a way to stay within the confines of the GPL while still being able to keep the lights on.