A tempest erupted in the WordPress community today on Twitter. It’s centered around the Thesis theme and creator Chris Pearson’s bucking of the GPL in it. WordPress is released under the GPL:
The GPL, or the GNU General Public Licence is the licence that WordPress is under. The licence is simple, you’re free to do what ever you want with it, make money with it, go nuts. However derivative works need to be under GPL.
Ever since Thesis was released two years ago, it’s not been released under the GPL. This has become a sticky point for the folks at Automattic. With the discovery of a malicious file in the 1.7 and 1.8b1 release of Thesis today, Matt decided to air his feelings on Thesis over Twitter. And we’re off.
Do a Twitter search for #thesiswp and you’ll see fairly strong opinions, some funny remarks, and quite a bit of snark.
The dustup got started today with WordPress developer (and fellow Coworking enthusiast) Bill Erickson – a damn good WordPress consultant in College Station. Automattic removed him from their VIP consultant listing, CoedPoet.com, due to his promotion of Thesis.
Austin WordPress community – do you have any thoughts? All the major players in this have Austin & Texas connections. I’d love to hear you sound off in the comments.
Update: Aaron Brazell just posted a good piece on the topic with mention of a possible lawsuit.
Related stories out in the blogosphere (will post more as I find them):