- wordpress.com releases custom CSS as a paid upgrade
- forseeing themes with options becoming rarer on wordpress.com, (they might detract from custom CSS sales), i suggest that an alternative upgrade to custom CSS could be the addition of themes that include color pickers.
- matt notices the new default drupal theme, gets mesmerized by the
big blue headercolor picker, and asks someone to port it to wordpress, ahead of the new drupal release. - wordpress hackers tell him this dilutes branding, makes wordpress look unoriginal, and is generally bad form.
- one of matt's employees emails the drupal developer asking for permission to port the theme (courtesy on top of license grants). drupal developer echoes what the wp-hackers said, asking said employee not to port the theme, at least until after drupal 5 is released.
- that employee is terminated.
- another automattic employee, (who doesn't ask) grabs the pre-release code and ports the theme to wordpress.com, although doesn't bother styling many of the elements lorelle considers core competency, nor dealing with image widths. the theme is also structurally incorrect, despite wordpress' claims to be 'a semantic publishing platform'.
- the drupal developer calls matt out on his lack of ethics.
- matt suggests trying to put the genie back in the bottle (1st comment on last link)
- wordpress.com users wonder if using the theme is a breach of ethics, or if now that matt's already thrown ethics out the window, they might as well, since they can.
- matt tells wordpress.com users to get the theme while they can, because he's going to try to save face by turning off the theme in a few
eons of internet timedays.
Post Script
- The Fanboys declare that matt is 'doing the right thing', despite the fact that the theme is still available on wp.com
- Garland developers ask wordpress.com users to stop using garland, since matt doesn't seem to be doing what he said/they asked.
- Matt disables garland for new blogs. any of the 500,000+ users who already have accounts, however, can continue to switch to garland at their leasure.
8 Comments
I don’t think its a matter of ethics simply branding, Drupal 5.0 is one of the best CMS going even in its beta version the Garland theme is part but not all of this release, meanwhile the WordPress theme is a stripped down barely working version of Garland on Drupal. The Drupal community can hardly complain if WordPress ports Drupal themes given they have been doing the reverse for years. The problem is a very small minority in the Drupal community fail to recognise that a theme does not make a brand, people rarely visit a web site because of the theme it uses (I mean real people here) in the same way I don’t just visit sites that use php.
The branding of Drupal is perhaps not as strong as some other open source projects an evil water droplet for a logo is probably not a great branding tool, but the key is that logo and not the theme people will remember.
Its good to see however Drupal community in general reaction which can be found here No torches no rants some are proud after all imitation is the highest form of flattery and that’s what they have been telling WordPress for years.
oops have been ranting a bit to long without getting to the point I don’t think WordPress has done anything wrong except a breakdown in communication rather then a breach of ethics and therefore no guilt at using the theme rather then paying wordpress.com for the privilege of modifying the css of another theme to fit Garland so for us its a win win situation. Sorry end Tirade
gee, didn’t realise this big issue going on… does that mean i can’t use garland if i switch themes now?
@sulz-
last i checked, it was still available. i don’t know if matt is actually going to turn it off or not.
@ventureskills-
the idea that ethics and courtesy are somehow irrelevant to open source, is the very attitude that made this an issue.
Quite the story there.
this is just the play by play. i’m still waiting on the color commentary from wank
and i haven’t even brought up matt taking credit for the thing.
ventureskillz:
Themes can very well act like branding, and WordPress is proof. More people associate ‘Kubric’ with WordPress than they do that god awful logo.
@adam
This like the misunderstanding in my comments is simple a communication breakdown, the point I was trying to make was that the Drupal community has been made out to be pitch fork waving gang, while the majority seem to be in favour of WordPress using their theme after all that’s the point of open source its there for all to use, so it isn’t a matter of ethics or courtesy these are important and I never implied they weren’t but simply not the issue, should Matt have done this prior to Drupal 5.0 launch given the emails that had been sent it would have been nice to hold back, why didn’t he, a breakdown in communication somewhere.
Has this harmed Drupal penetration into CMS not at all its probably helped to reach a whole new audience who have been watching this debate and realise that the version of Garland they have is effectively crippleware and may be tempted to try out the real deal via drupal.org after all, all news is good news, of course when the blogging community goes on a witch hunt or tries to burn the barn down because of a couple of badly worded posts it might not be the case but for the now the analogy holds.
With regards to brands the nice thing is that Drupal allows instant changes with no outward sign a site is powered by Drupal so in its case themes as a brand is diminished and I suspect given the number of variants of WordPress themes your Kubric analogy doesn’t really stand up at least for lay men though I take your point. Did you know Kubric has been ported to Drupal
amongst others making it one of the most widely adopted themes across CMS in general not just WordPress.
open source means open to tap, to spread, to port, to share, to copy, manipulate, do whatever with it that must be done. if somebody decides to make a theme available to other systems for their users to benefit from a themes “usability” then the porter is a good mover. its about the theme, not so much about drupal against wordpress. its clear that users will notice both systems to be awesome tools.
and in a few months people will get bored about the colorpicker thing anyways.
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