WordPress and Thesis: Free as in beer, or Free as in speech?

(Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes)

I’m sitting here at Dos Palmas, Website In A Weekend central, wondering what to write about today. I’m listening to a new Deep House mix by my friend DJ Native State, who, sadly, just doesn’t do that “web thing.”

But life is good overall.

I could write about money. But everyone writes about money, what more could I say? (Probably a lot, but not right now.)

Let’s tackle something a little more difficult: software licensing.

Namely, why some software is free, and other software is not.

Actually, software licensing isn’t that hard to understand. Fundamentally,

The details hinge on exactly what kind of license. Because there are a bunch of different free licenses.

First, some backstory.

What most people don’t get is that most of the first 10-15 years of the internet was built by people working for Big Government, Big Corporation or Big Education.

This is a fact.

I used to be a part of it. You can look me up at the Wayback machine if you’re so inclined. They have me back to 1996, at Tennessee.

Such folk have no need to make money on the internet, because their salaries are already paid. They built the internet on your tax dollars.

They are not your customers. They aren’t anyone’s online customers. Except maybe Amazon and O’Reilly.

Giving away everything for free not only made sense, it was the right thing to do.

By and largely, this is a good thing. The entire internet runs on freely available software such as Apache, MySQL and PHP. This software is the result of millions (or tens of millions) of dollars of investment value into programming and engineering.

Software with the capability of WordPress also requires millions of dollars worth of engineering and programming. At least initially. Once the problem is understood, and the tools are built, developing something like WordPress becomes much easier. It’s like that “overnight success” thing. You know, overnight success takes 10 years. But it takes that initial investment of time and money to get it figured out.

The private sector, with it’s command and control structure, isn’t really capable of producing this sort of self-organizing engineering. What you get ex nihilo from the private sector is software like (s)Lotus Notes. A good idea in theory, in practice, not so much. Or even Facebook, all built on free software, but the user interface is execrable.

Clearly, we have all benefitted from free software.

But I’m not being entirely clear about this notion of “free.”

Some software is “Free” as in free speech. Not free as in free beer.

Of course, other software is free as in free beer.

All depends on the license.

WordPress is free as in Free speech.

That means you can do whatever you want with WordPress, except deny your changes to WordPress to anyone you transmit your code to.

Want to create the most blazing fast WordPress installation ever and sell hosting? No problem. Optimize WordPress and sell as many hosting accounts as you like.

But if you decide you want to sell your code, you are required by US copyright law to transmit every change you made to the WordPress code.

And this makes perfect sense. The people that wrote WordPress decided that such a license was their Terms and Conditions for you to use WordPress. They wrote the code, they chose the license.

Themes and plugins

As it turns out, I like the Thesis theme quite a bit, and as a developer myself, have no problem paying for Thesis. It costs money to live.

As it also turns out, the Thesis developer apparently copied code directly from WordPress into Thesis.

Oups.

That code has subsequently been removed. The discussion resulting from that put Thesis (rightly or wrongly) under some pretty intense scrutiny from WordPress developers.

As a result, Thesis core code is now under a Free software license. “Core code” meaning all the code interacting directly with WordPress.

The styling and behavior of Thesis remains under the same proprietary license as usual.

Here’s whats important.

There is a fundamental legal issue that still hasn’t been resolved: Exactly what constitutes code derived from WordPress?

In my opinion, theme and plugin code should not be regarded as being derived code. However, my opinion doesn’t count for shit, and unless your name is Mullenweg or Jaquith (or other contributor to WordPress), your opinion doesn’t count either.

Before anyone starts hyperventilating… I’m cool with this.

Seriously, I’m cool with it. They wrote the code, they gave it away, I benefit massively. Unless a judge rules otherwise, that’s how it’s going to be. If you don’t like it, go write your own code.

The ramifications for you as a Thesis user: probably not much. Technically, none at all. Popular software going open source generally shows a step function in improvement shortly after the code is released. I know I have a few things I could change in the Thesis source.

How the whole issue plays out in a larger scale will be far more interesting. Web applications (please note date) aren’t quite the same as operating systems, code generators or dynamic libraries, so there is law still to be made.