Hacker News Reader

Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

This is the kind of stuff that makes commercial companies fearful of GPL software. It's not the disagreement that is the serious issue, but the fact that this legal document is completely unclear as to how it's supposed to work (and the LGPL is even more frighteningly uninterpretable).

View on HN

id Software makes its game engines free when their technology gets dated, but the artistic/creative content remains copyrighted. They do this by having a copyright "airlock" interface between the executable and the game data (WAD/PAK/PK3/whatever files). The lesson to learn from this conflict is that if you run an open-source project that encourages creative or artistic content add-ons that may remain proprietary, it's a good idea to establish a rigid copyright airlock between the free stuff and the creative stuff.

Lots of open source projects do similar- an example is Firefox, which owns their branding and resulted in "Iceweasel" for Debian ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re... ).

id Software is also the copyright holder of the games and can choose to license the game or parts of the game out however they want and as often as they want.

They did have the occasional issue where they were using comercial libraries and had to take those out of the codebase before they could open source them.

In this case, the theme developers are not copyright holders of the WordPress code and thus are subject to the WordPress.org's license.

And how would one suggest this be implemented with WordPress?

Making the creative portion an entirely different codebase/downloadable that is licensed under something else.

If, like WordPress, you want to enforce GPL compliance for derivative projects, then spell out clear exceptions to your derivation clause - if they even just spelled out themes it would have made this problem moot.

It doesn't seem that WordPress wants to make an exception. That is, the license without exceptions is functioning exactly as they intend, and they think ThemeForest is doing something wrong, not should-be-right-but-is-technically-wrong.

I feel like they don't want to spell it out. It allows them to gain a ton of value and IP to then wrap up and sell on their site as part of a service (without giving anything back).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com