Comment by jholloway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jholloway | Hacker News Reader

I guess I'm the only one who saw Matt as the obnoxious one in that conversation? He kept putting words in Chris' mouth, playing slap-fight, and making snarky statements like, "Oh, I'll be sure to consult you in the future before I say anything." And the worst was when he said that "literally the whole legal community except for one guy in Florida" agrees with his interpretation of the GPL. That's just ignorant and irresponsible. About as bad as citing three clearly biased pro-GPL organizations as your sources for why you're right.

Look, I agree that Chris probably overstated his position in the WP community. It probably wasn't the smartest thing to call himself one of the top 3 most influential people in WP. However, I feel that his reasons for not wanting to go GPL are legitimate and for some reason Matt can't seem to understand that Chris is making a stand on principle here, not just revenue. I also understand his frustration. He's getting pounded left and right, sometimes with vicious personal attacks, mainly based on Matt's specious arguments. He's fed up, he's tired of the talk, and he wants Matt/WP to take action if they really care that much about it.

As far as I am concerned, if they really believe Chris is in violation of the license, WP can and should take action to try to shut down Chris if he doesn't comply, including legal action. They are fully within their rights to do that. But please, don't just sit back and spew half-truths and try to tear down the guy's reputation. As the old saying goes, if you're going to talk the talk, you should walk the walk.

Nobody likes going to court. It's expensive and contentious.

Matt made an impressive effort to appeal to law, ethics, the golden rule, economics, majority opinion, and more, and for the vast majority of the interview, he did it politely.

Chris essentially said, "There's no way I'm going to change my mind no matter what because it's my opinion. Why don't you sue me?"

Matt cited IP lawyers and organizations. He also cited that large corporations have wanted to challenge but decided not to.

I found it to be a lopsided argument in the most complete way possible.

I think the point here is that Chris is one of the first people to stand up and challenge the assertion made by Matt that the GPL automatically applies to all WP themes and plugins. Everyone has just sat there and accepted it up to now. Everyone on HN and elsewhere that is just telling Chris, "Oh, just follow the rules, why are you fighting this?" — why should he follow rules that may as well be arbitrary?

Even if this does go to court and it turns out that Chris is indeed in violation of the GPL, I still applaud him for having the courage to stick to what he believes in. In my opinion, the GPL needs to be tested either way. I think at this point we can all speculate, but no one really knows what will or won't stand up in front of a judge and jury.

I would have been very interested if this had gone to court to test the GPL purely in the context of themes/plugins, because to me that's the grey area. As it is, I wish (for the sake of both parties) that the matter could be settled without legal intervention. Now that it's been demonstrated that Thesis outright copies and incorporates portions of WP source code, it seems unlikely that a court decision would directly answer the question of plugins, because it wouldn't need to. (I don't think anybody argues that such copying isn't a GPL violation.)

I would admire Chris for that reason if any of his arguments had been even slightly cogent.

Maybe there's a reason people have accepted it up to now.

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