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Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

I'm still under the impression that WordPress themes have to be GPL'd (because WordPress is).

Is this not the case?

Regardless, it's impressive.

There's no legal precedent that a theme is somehow a derivative work of the software it's designed for. There haven't even been any good cases to give precedent for dynamic linking creating a derivative work. That's the only way the GPL could possibly apply, since nobody's distributing WordPress with their themes.

How is taking the HTML for a webpage you've created, replacing the title with <?php the_title(); ?> and putting <?php the_content(); ?> in the content area, a derivative work of the WordPress code base? Yet that's the argument they're making when someone say you're bound by WordPress's license by creating a theme that will work with it.

You can't just throw a license at someone that hasn't agreed to it. It's a completely untested legal theory Matt relies on when he says WP themes have to be GPL. There are lots of people that don't buy it at all, like the creator of Thesis, which is one of the best selling commercial WP themes.

Themes are more than dynamic linking, are they not? After all, they require PHP code to function properly.

I understand with regards to artwork, but a theme is more than images and CSS.

There's no legal precedent, but if you want to read a ton of legal speculation on a related topic (some by informed people, some by those less informed), there's a pretty large body of writing on the hypothetical issues of whether proprietary Linux kernel modules violate the GPL.

edit: here's a pretty thorough law-review article: http://web.bu.edu/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/bulr...

That article is a nice find. Thanks!

That was a good read, thanks. It supports that WordPress themes are likely not derivative works, though -- dynamic linking, use only minimal non-complex interface code, are primarily unique code that could run on any platform (HTML/CSS/etc) with only a small amount of WordPress "compatibility code" as the paper calls it.

That's my understanding. We frequently build websites for clients on Wordpress, and certainly aren't intending to release them under GPL, although I don't think it would make a huge difference in practice.

The fact that Wordpress delivers the content to the theme is basically irrelevant in my eyes. All the work goes into the design, HTML, CSS and Javascript, and the end product is an original work.

from what I remember from the interview the themes are indeed GPLed, so you can get it for free if you want. You just don't get the support. Or something along those lines.

That's my understanding from the interview.

they are GPL'd. you still have to buy them tho. so essentially you could buy it then distribute it,etc.,etc. but that's not happening.

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