I would not think this sort of thing would need to be explained to someone like matt mullenweg. Here's the comment I left on his blog, which will probably not make it past :the great firewall of matt
I think I'm missing something -
so I make this "killer" GPL, CSS only theme. you sell it for $50, on the premise that it's not a generic XXL poncho (I know you said pink, but what you meant was gray with a blue hood). Immediately on release, any self-hosted blog can download it and install it themselves. Since it's CSS-only, anyone on wordpress.com can pay for the CSS Upgrade and start using it. Suddenly it seems like my theme is another XXL poncho, and the guy who bought it trying to get a unique design is seriously screwed.
I must be thinking about this wrong.
It's not that there aren't perfectly valid revenue models based on the GPL. It's just that this is the only one that isn't. Once a GPL slice of code is released1 , it can be redistributed by everyone. There are (very few) projects that actually sell GPL-ed code. X-chat for windows is the one that comes to mind. It works because compiling source code on windows is such a pain. The more viable methods of making money from GPL software include selling support2, and selling proprietary add-ons.
The way the latter option works with wordpress themes is that the underlying PHP has to be GPL, but the CSS can be any license. Matt, instead is looking for CSS-only, GPL themes. This gets extra bizarre in that any CSS-only theme can be implemented by anyone with the CSS upgrade. Since the themes are GPL, automattic can't even legally suggest that they shouldn't do that.
Designing premium themes is already a tough market. At least designers willing to handle the storefront themselves aren't further hampered by having to open-source their graphics. Arpit is right to question the sensibility of such a marketplace, and Michael Martin reaches a similar conclusion.
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you are right on the money.
Personally I think their business model is a bit bizarre.
But only time will tell.
I think matt is hoping that most users on WordPress.com will pay to get better themes.
Like I said I really don’t mind what the licence is a long as I get back the actual cost of the theme.
But this will benefit people who give away free theme.
I think the idea of a marketplace will work well on wordpress.com, I can even see it being useful for plugins (share this, etc). It’s a nice idea, to have a store that pays the designer/coder, and also gives the (WP.org) community something. The license will probably not matter to most designers, which is why Matt’s GPL requirement is so strange.
To me, it smacks too much of taking advantage of wp.com users who don’t know any better, really. First, they charge them to do pretty much anything useful, and if you can’t be bothered to learn a bit of CSS (which isn’t that hard, really) they are going to charge you again.
If it were me, and I was in that sort of position, I’d be pissed.
Not to mention it doesn’t take much of a leap to realize that cost-wise, you could set up the standalone wp if you’re willing to learn it. Or heck, jump ship to blogspot.
Cost-wise, yes, it’s a bad deal. I suppose the only advantage to buying a custom theme rather than custom CSS would be that the theme will be “supported”. Matt sees wordpress.com bloggers as people who don’t want to fiddle with cPanel or fantastico. I don’t think they mean to take advantage of them that way. Nor do I think he means to put designers in the position of defending GPL abuse. I think he’s actually just not thought it through.
X-chat for Windows being sold. Yep. But you don’t need to buy it: http://silverex.org
It’s silly to debate a marketplace like this, it will either work or it won’t. Like everything Automattic does, we’ll iterate based on feedback (we already have a few times) and more importantly based on usage.
As far as the marketplace itself, I completely agree. As far as the licensing; I suppose you could wait for it to come to a head, but it’d be much better to start off with a plan that scales well.
@mark –
cool, I suppose it was only a matter of time before something like that showed up. nonetheless, x-chat was on my list of open-source projects I’d always meant to donate to.
Some people have more money than time, and some people have more time than money.
Not only that, but people’s time is more valuable to some projects than others. I understand wordpress enough to write specific bug reports and develop themes. the same isn’t true of hydraIRC or X-chat, nor will it ever be.
X-chat was free. The person compiling it then decided to make it a paid program. There was a lot of noise about it – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xchat – hence the silverex version.
It was more it had to happen rather than might have happened.
yeah, I knew there was a lot of noise about it. I didn’t realize he didn’t get permission from patch submitters.
PHP-Nuke does it as well. To obtain the most recent version, you have to pay ten bucks to download it from the main site.
Of course you can also go to one of the hundreds of PHP-Nuke support sites and download it from there for free. It is GPL’ed and can’t be prevented.
I still pay the ten bucks though. I look at it as supporting the software and the development of it.
that’s why I thought it worth it for x-chat. it’s just a shame i didn’t realize the money didn’t go to everyone involved. It basically amounts to a suggested donation.
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02 Nov 2007 at 4:18 pm
this was going to be a photomatt comment. it growed. « wordpress™ wank
[...] Basically, you just threw ntuat.wordpress.com down the drain. Nothing there is going to be eligible for inclusion because it’s not brand-new and I’m not a professional. (Some of it’s not even mine, they’re ports of third-party GPL themes that were either requested or which I felt filled a gap in the existing selection.) People are going to be even less interested in buying custom CSS if they can pay the same price and get an official theme that doesn’t need to be copy/pasted. Assuming that custom CSS is still available, of course, rather than having been removed because people are using it to rip off all these killer premium themes. [...]
03 Nov 2007 at 7:25 pm
fifty fifty « JAWW (beta)
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