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.

1. Meaning, once it's been bought, but in this context, Matt is saying that it will also be made available to self-hosted users (back ↩)
2. CSS support on wordpress.com is currently volunteer-only, staff refuse to touch it (back ↩)

it bewilders me that this image is present on the header of Small Potato's recently added theme. Small Potato is a decent guy, and after it was pointed out that using the cover of a movie as a header image wasn't exactly following the letter of copyright law, he announced that people should change it, and modified the theme to remove it. The theme is beautiful in its own right, without the header. How, then, did it sneak past the wordpress.com admins' notice that the image shouldn't be installed here?

you might think that they were distracted or confused by the recent license change at wpdesigner, (despite neo-sapien having always been GPL), except that as i mentioned, the theme isn't available with that header anymore. given that matt doesn't really understand the concept of relicensing, or why the GPL is such a pain in the ass for designers, i guess i shouldn't be surprised.

then again, maybe i'm wrong. maybe matt did fork over some cash to Dreamworks to license their IP for all of us here on wordpress.com. personally, i'd think the money could be spent on something better, (like a lawyer) but i'm just a user.

does anyone else find this terribly ironic?  especially given the problem of his microformats not being an open standard, i find it odd that chris wouldn't hesitate to follow the party line.

they do have cool icons, though:

but they can't be distributed with wordpress themes. It's not that i don't want to attribute the author. it's the the FSF doesn't want that to be a requirement upon users of the software. which is why most linux software uses the standard KDE or GNOME icons: it's too difficult to find their own, or make an entirely new set.

In other news, after the last bit of ads-in-themes arm-waving, and free beer license wavingpointy-headedness, a solution from scott's themes occured to me:

with a little bit of str_replace() and printf() magic (that i'm especially proud of learning), that input produces this footer:

which of course, allows a user to maintain my credit or not, without having to touch code. of course, they could also take the opportunity to say 'based on', if they've modified it, but i'm not sure how likely either course of action is. It would solve the 'ads-in-themes' issue for most people, i would think, since it makes it dead simple to change/remove, if the ad is included the same way. except, of course, it won't solve it for matt, who's thinks he's protecting google's algorithms. for him, it'd have to be done in javascript. which i won't do because

• i hate javascript.
• google makes too much money for me to do their work for them.

UPDATE: The tag icon is here. Here are some light blue ones to match the microformat icons:

(obviously these are CC-by-sa, based on the work by  Wolfgang Bartelme).