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Comment by ajg1977 | Hacker News Reader

ajg1977

Could we please not have anymore "Why Wordpress themes do/don't fall under the GPL" posts from people who aren't lawyers?

It's an interesting topic, but it's been done to death over the past week in both the blogosphere and on HN. Pretty much every point made, or example given, can be debated in many ways. Until someone is doing so infront of a judge or jury, all of them are largely irrelevant and just noise.

That said, if you are a lawyer with experience in cases involving the GPL then post away. I'd love to hear your point of view :)

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I thought this piece did a good job of summarizing the issues, and an especially good job diving into the technical details of this specific example. Those details are sadly lacking from much of the "noise" being made on the topic - the mixergy interview, for example. This post is signal.

The problem is that the technical details it dove into aren't particularly relevant to the underlying copyright question. They show that the user who choses to use a given theme is creating a derivative work, but no one has seriously questioned that. That derivative work is authorized by the copyright holders (GPL allows users to freely mix GPL and non-GPL code on their own systems).

Hence, the important legal question is whether or not the theme, AS DISTRIBUTED, is a derivative work of WordPress. This is a code authoring question, not a code execution flow question. There was little or no insight on that question in the article.

That is a really, really interesting question and there is actually some history behind that - the original developers of Clisp had used GNU readline to implement their REPL. Readline was (and still is) GPL, while Clisp was proprietary.

Anyhow RMS wrote to them and complained, so they asked an interesting question: what would happen if they simply had their software download and link Readline when it was installed on the customers computer?

RMS talked with a lawyer, and came to the conclusion that it would properly not be against the law. They made some sort of agreement and Clisp is GPL today.

While the GPL is a copyright license and a legal construct that is not the only lens with which it should be viewed. It is very much a social construct with a general understanding (i.e. agreement) that differs from the actual text. Do you have a changelog in the actual files? The GPL requires one, but many people do not and I've never heard of someone getting upset because someone did not include one.

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