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):

1. GNU GPL type licenses.  Very open.
2. Liberal Licenses (i.e. Creative Commons type, Mozilla Public License). Mostly open.
3. 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 ]

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.

There will be some items to download for your own use.  Not all of them will be free, but some will.  I’ve spent a lot of time on these, and I hope you might find them useful.  If you like what you see and want something custom done or a tweak to something up there, let me know on the page.

Anything you guys would like to see for WordPress?  I’m always looking for ideas.

Found this via John Saddington today.  It’s good enough that I wanted to post this for any of my readers who design Wordpress themes.

This article contains some Wordpress cheat sheets for all of your theme development and design needs.  I’ve already downloaded most of them, and will be referencing them often.

So, click through and enjoy, and let us know if you found them useful.

I’ve taken a little break from tweeting and blogging for the last week.  Part was for vacation.  Dusty and I went to Pigeon Forge, TN for a few days.  We had a great time!  No computers, no Twitter, just us.  Wonderful.

But it did cause me to think about producing and consuming.

Lately I have been producing a lot.  I’ve been blogging, Wordpressing, and Tweeting so much, I drained myself.  I’ve blogged before on the value of silence before.  I think I relearned that this week.

So, to keep it short: sometimes you need to just sit back and consume life.  By that, I mean to enjoy time with family and friends, to go out and relax in the woods, to experience at art as opposed to creating art.  When we overproduce, we empty ourselves.  And when we are empty, nothing overflows.  Our art, our work, our passions come from that overflow.  Remember this next time you push yourself too hard.  Take an hour, a day, a week to refill yourself.  It’ll do you good.

So, what recharges you?  What drains you?  When do you need a break most?

As a new theme builder myself, I had to ask around on what I needed to know to build a Wordpress theme.  So, I made a short list.  Here are the basic things you need to build yourself a Wordpress theme.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets are awesome.  They make your whole site look great (and uniform), and can even quickly make another site or project blend in.  (for example, ChurchCrunch and its forums)

You need to get familiar with this code because it will style everything on your site.  Setting up columns, the width of your page, what color your text is, the background, it’s all done here.

CSS is probably the easiest way to start with themes.  I used a stock theme and tweaked the .css file until I got something of what I wanted.  Once you get the hang of that, you’ll be ready for more.

HTML

Knowing HTML (or now, XHTML) is also a must.  You need to know what all of those tags do, how to code in an image, and what all that means.

After you learn some HTML, you can customize the look and layout even more.  Adding extra <div> tags to make new sections that you want to style separately makes the blog more unique.  And setting up a comments class to style your comment section.

PHP

Ok, php is where the rubber meets the road.  PHP is what Wordpress lives in.  It’s a dynamic language that makes HTML files for your browser to read on the fly.

When you learn PHP and the Wordpress functions and template tags, you can pretty much do anything you want to do inside your blog.  Change up the front page layout, add a search bar outside of the sidebar, set up different templates for different categories, and much more.

Other Themes

Ok, my secret to coding is this: look at other people’s code.  I grabbed some free themes and looked at how the author coded.  How he did this to generate that effect.  How she got that look for her text.  A book helps, but when you see it, change it, and learn how to tweak yourself, I think you learn faster.

I haven’t learned everything yet, not by a long shot.  If you have a tip or idea, leave a comment so we all can learn.

Joshua Wagner Online

I’ve called the theme SlateBlue (for obvious reasons).  I’m considering releasing the theme in some form, but I’m not sure yet.  Any suggestions are welcome as well.

Enjoy!

[Image by NeitherFanboy]