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Open or Closed, Part II: License and Free(dom)

July 10, 2009 | Art | Technology

sourcecode

I found another portion of the open or closed question. What about open and closed software licenses?

Here’s a quick rundown of the license categories (check here for more details):

GNU GPL type licenses. Very open.
Liberal Licenses (i.e. Creative Commons type, Mozilla Public License). Mostly open.
Closed source (i.e. proprietary license). Closed.

The more open your license, the more innovation you generally have. WordPress is licensed as GPL. Anyone can see and edit the WordPress code, and thus, a very diverse, dynamic, and versatile platform has emerged.

The problem with the GPL type licenses, that I see, is the return. I can’t really reap the rewards for my work when anyone else can make a tweak and give it away. Also, if you were to combine a GPL licensed work and any non-GPL work, according to the license you’d need to release the whole larger work as GPL. Effectively, you’d have to release your closed source code to abide by the license. It doesn’t sound very “free” to me.

The liberal licenses form the middle, allowing open source innovations but with the option to combine works or the option to redistribute with different licenses. They tend to play nice with GPL (as in the work can be licensed under GPL without breaking the other license), and might allow greater return.

In recent times, closed source hasn’t had the best run. Just take a look at the state of the music business to see what happens when you overuse the “closed” idea. But yet, closed source still generates the revenue.

I’m not an expert with these licenses, nor am I a lawyer. But this I do know: forcing people to use a particular license is not freedom. That part of the GPL rubs me the wrong way. I do understand the desire to not be ripped off, as in the case of a closed source project essentially stealing open source code. That isn’t right either.

So, where do you stand? I don’t know at the moment for myself. As a content creator, I want return on my investment (or at least control of it). As a content user, I want to be able to use and improve what is there. Is there an answer? Let me know what you think.

[ Image by acme ]

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Notice for WordPress Theme and Plugin Developers

July 4, 2009 | Technology

themespluginsdb Just wanted to pass some info along to all of you budding theme developers. Your themes need to be licensed under GPL.

Well, okay, part of them. According to this article from WordPress the php and html in your themes are GPL because WordPress itself is under the GPL. However, the css files and any images in your theme do not technically need to be licensed under the GPL. Talk about a monkey wrench!

What that means is technically you could pull off a case where you can hold all the rights to your css and image files to control the php and html. Now, I’m not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination (and the only area I know something about is music copyright law), but that seems to be really tricky.

As an aside, this is really only a problem for premium themes and plugins. Because the php and html are derivative works of WordPress, you must follow the GPL. That does not mean that you cannot charge for your time, effort, and distribution of the themes or plugins. But you have to allow for the provisions of the GPL; namely, your code must be available, and anyone else can modify and/or distribute the code without permission.

Ah, the new world of copyright and license. For me, I’ve spent a good amount of time coding, tweaking, and testing my WordPress Creations. And while I do agree that open is better, I would like the option to get something back for my effort.

Do you all have any thoughts? Any arguments for or against?

Edit: Well, it seems the crux of the argument is what constitues a derivative work of WordPress. This article details the problem. Thanks to Andrei from Softblog for the link.

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