It’s just sad. And the dirty little secret of this bizarre programming-for-love approach is that WordPress plugins are nearly all lousy, broken and unsupported. After all, most people come to their sense eventually or get good enough to write software that pays.

Kevin Eklund cam out out on top., not looking like the rude one.

Thanks for your continues contribution to the WordPress community.

Keep up the good work!!
Red
.-= Red´s last blog ..Steve is back: over 1m Apple iPhone 3GS sold =-.

http://www.law.washington.edu/lct/swp/Law/derivative.html

It’s a long article but it’s well worth the read.
.-= Andrei Belogortseff´s last blog ..Getting online in New Zealand =-.

Kevin I’ve had an idea. Here is my plan. Why don’t you do what other people do (the real WordPress Rockstars) and contribute this so called list of acceptable GPL models back to the community. We know you can write well and it seems like you have a lot of time on your hands and it certainly seems as though you’ve certainly done your research.

I don’t think its a big ask especially since people like Matt, Michael and Brian are busy working on their respective projects.

It seems to me like you could have written this “list of acceptable business models” 10 times over in the time that it has taken you to personally retort to each of these comments. What a huge amount of time you must have spent on this, I hope you havent lost any sleep over it.

Because time is short you should start as soon as possible and when you’re finished you could either sell it online using the WP e-Commerce Plugin or you could except online donations. If you choose the later and if Michael chips in $10 I’ll chip in $10 too.

On a more serious note I’m going to talk about our business model at the UK WordCamp coming up soon.
.-= Dan Milward´s last blog ..simpleCart + thematic (weekend) challenge =-.

Yeah, that last part isn’t in the GPL. The GPL doesn’t dictate what I can have on my site.

“The bottom line, as most of us theme/plugin developers have waded through is that as long as your theme/plugin is 100% GPL, then case closed. You’re good.”

That contradicts the above statement.

So If you’re theme / plugin is 100% GPL and the authors site doesn’t have anything on it that breaches an extra set of rules then you are ok?

This is a great article dedicated to the true pursuit of excellence in work regardless of the perceived rewards or lack thereof. Thank you for your dedication.

Stuart

It’s all about the license.

If your theme carries the GPL license 100%, you can charge for the theme, the support behind it and what not.

If your theme carries the GPL license 100%, and you or any sites you are affiliated with are not actively promoting non GPL themes, then your theme will be considered for submission into the WP.org directory.

It’s not gray area here – pretty black and white to me. The bottom line, as most of us theme/plugin developers have waded through is that as long as your theme/plugin is 100% GPL, then case closed. You’re good.

If you’re worried about readers getting misinformed I think it’s a little late for that. The comments on your post, prior to me ever writing my article or commenting on your site, were misinformed and that’s why there was and is so much confusion.

Your own article posted on 12-11-2008 citing the 200 themes removed from WordPess.org does more to misinform the reader than my article ever could. That is, unlike you, I do not censor people and remove their avatar link because I disagree with their opinion. Anyone is welcome to share their opinion on my article as I believe that best defense against misinformation is open discussion so we can point out what is true and what is not. Censorship is the worst and most despicable act on the web and everyone knows that.

I wish you the best Justin. Honestly, I don’t dislike you just because you disagree with my opinion and I won’t censor you if you choose to share your opinion with my readers. I encourage you to comment if you see any misinformation and I will update the post or write a follow-up article to tackle such misinformation.