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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

There is specific wording in the GPL covering that case.

I am not trying to use "tortured logic" to make a point; I really think this is how Wordpress themes work. Without a theme, Wordpress does absolutely nothing. The theme makes calls into Wordpress to add data and display data. Each theme is its own piece of blogging software that uses Wordpress to abstract away common problems. That's a library.

Another "application" that is actually a library is xmonad. It's a library for writing a window manager that works in a certain way, and it's your "config file" that actually uses the library in such a way as to make a window manager. This is not "tortured logic", it is just good software design. (Although in the case of Wordpress, it's not the right design. Themes should not be applications, they should be data.)

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There is specific wording in the GPL covering that case.

Which part of the GPL do you have in mind?

Each theme is its own piece of blogging software that uses Wordpress to abstract away common problems. That's a library.

That's a library under a tremendously contorted definition of library. As I said, if that's the criterion for something being a library, any program that loads and runs extensions is a library. Firefox is a library, Apache is a library, etc. It may be your preferred definition but it's at odds with both common sense and the way the Wordpress people describe their product.

http://wordpress.org/about/

The issue is direction. Themes call into Wordpress to get data. Mozilla plugins are called by Mozilla; if anything, Mozilla becomes GPL'd when it loads a GPL'd plugin. (Remember the whole "kernel taint" issue?)

Anyway, if you want me to dissect a Wordpress theme and show you why I think this, I will. But I think it's obvious if you look for yourself.

On the other hand, it's WordPress where execution begins, and it's WordPress that loads the theme into the interpreter.

This isn't necessarily true - it's quite possible that a Wordpress index template is the first thing run. The idea that copyright law hinges on who called whom first remains preposterous, though.

Possible, but exceedingly rare. For a theme to provide a top-level script, it would be referenced with a URL like mysite.com/wp-content/themes/mytheme/scriptname.php, which would be ugly, brittle, and contrary to the clean-URL style that WordPress promotes. It is nearly universal that WordPress's code responds to a request first, and then dispatches to the appropriate files in a theme depending on the type of request.

I don't think there is a case in which 'direction' figured in a copyright decision. The criteria are much more straightforward than that.

You never answered my question about what specific GPL language excludes the Linux kernel from the kinds of claims you are making about Wordpress. Or Mozilla (you claimed Mozilla loading a GPL'ed extension makes it GPL which is an interpretation that makes the GPL not 'viral' but an actual virus)

It's interesting that the structure of Wordpress affects whether the themes are derivative works. Maybe it's the PHP-soup style of HTML interspersed with PHP function calls that creates the situation you describe. The same system written so that the themes are stored as lists of colors and dimensions to be interpreted by the blog software would keep the themes as non-derivative works.

Definitely. XSLT is something that could work this way -- the blogging software generates an XML document with all the relevant information, and then the XML stylesheet is applied to make the XHTML (or Atom, etc.) result. Additional CSS and Javascript could of course be bundled.

In this case, there would be no question as to the legal status of the theme. It's just a program that transforms the output of another.

The existence of "hooks" further complicates things. WordPress themes are essentially collections of event handler scripts, and those scripts can register callbacks such that when core WordPress functions are called, those callbacks are executed. So, you have WordPress calling the theme calling WordPress calling the theme...

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