The hoo hah about themes and GPL and community is still ongoing. I’ve been having a discussion about charging for WordPress themes over at XFEP, but I thought I should explain my point of view. So here it is.
I aim to be very logical and direct in most cases; therefore I will first attempt to consider what I think are the relevant points.
WordPress.org refers to:
The project consists of the management of contributions to the WordPress core code that make up the free (as in money) WordPress software. These contributions are provided by a wide range of individuals who contribute to the project either in their spare time, or as part of their employment with firms that generate an income from WordPress related products or services.
This is where things start to get tricky, and why this post is titled as it is. This is where people will begin to disagree.
I think we can all agree that: The community is a group of individuals who share an interest in the WordPress project.
I think we can also all agree that: An individual’s interest in the project may be intellectual, personal, professional, or financial.
I have excluded commercial deliberately as I do not believe anyone can have commercial interest in (i.e. own part of) the WordPress project. Note that when I refer to the project I am still referring to WordPress the software, and not the general contributions of the community.
I think it is reasonable to divide the community into two here in order to differentiate between the directly engaged community, that is, the people who blog about WordPress, and contribute to the repositories, and forums, and the wider WordPress community that use it, sell it (such as web designers that base sites on it), or develop based on it. This division is important for my view, but, even though you may disagree with my view, I think this step is reasonable.
So far then I have explained the community, in reference to other parts of the project, in the way shown by this diagram:
For the rest of my discussion about the community I want to exclude the wider community and focus on the directly engaged community (The Community).
Here I need to examine what it is that I think any community is. Not just this community, but any community. It is a little theoretical so I hope you will excuse me.
In 1986 McMillan & Chavis put forward a theory of Pshycological Sense of Community. They defined it briefly as:
a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together.
More specifically they attributed community to four central elements:
You can read more about the paper and the follow-up here.
So what does this mean?
It means that The Community is, as all communities are, a group of people with similar needs that contribute to the whole in order to benefit from the contributions of others. They give influence over others in proportion to their contributions and likewise expect to have a level of influence that is proportionate to their own contributions. Receiving influence is in some ways compensation for taking less than their contributions.
Within The Community each person expects others to be considerate to them as they are considerate to others; however, this consideration is a matter of faith and so once shaken can result in severe consequences such as significant disillusionment, a feeling that the community no longer supports them, and a desire to retaliate.
The Community is about the balance of give and take. This I think is the crux of the matter.
If you are a member of the community what is it that you value?
Depending on how you view the WordPress community, what you value, and what you view as a contribution will determine whether you think excluding items from a repository for reason X is a good thing or a bad thing. You are likely to feel very strongly about it either way. For example:
Do you agree that: A person that makes a plugin freely available is appropriately compensated by the thousands of other plugins and themes that are available to him for free?
Do you agree that: A person that makes a plugin freely available is appropriately compensated by including a link back to his website on every website that uses the plugin in addition to the thousands of other plugins and themes that are available to him for free?
Do you agree that: A person that makes a plugin freely available is appropriately compensated by including a link back to his website on every website that uses the plugin if he is using that to advertise a paid product or service, in addition to the thousands of other plugins and themes that are available to him for free?
Do you agree that: A person who makes a theme freely available is appropriately compensated by the thousands of plugins and themes that are available to him for free?
Do you agree that: A theme author who makes a theme available is only appropriately compensated by the community by having those individuals that want to use the theme pay for using it, despite the availability of the thousands of free themes and plugins that are available to him?
Do you agree that: A theme author who makes a theme available is only appropriately compensated by the community by having those individuals that want to use the theme pay for using it, and by using the community website as a platform to advertise, despite the availability of the thousands of free themes and plugins that are available to them?
Do you agree that: A theme author who makes a theme available is only appropriately compensated by the community by having those individuals that want to use the theme pay for using it, and by using the community website as a platform to advertise, and by including a link on the website of every person that uses the theme to link back to their own website despite the availability of the thousands of free themes and plugins that are available to them?
Do you agree that: The community receives fair compensation from an individual who releases a theme for free, that puts a link on every page of every website that uses the theme, where that link links back to a website promoting a product or service that the individual will be paid for, despite the availability to that individual of thousands of themes and plugins offered for free by the members of the community?
There are a lot of situations and questions there. They are intended to stir thought, not make a point. My point is simply what I think.
I think premium theme authors, who have put more resource into creating a theme than they can support through spare time alone, deserve to be compensated for that effort above and beyond the content that the community provides, assuming the content provided by the community represents only that spare time, i.e. is of a lesser value than the premium theme author can recoup from the community. They should be able to sell their themes for an appropriate cost to recoup the difference between what the community provides and the extra they have put in. Capitalism will decide how much is fair.
I think that releasing free themes to the community with the intent to advertise, via a link to a website that offers paid services, is reasonable provided the creation of the theme expended sufficient additional resource to equal the value of the advertising provided by the community. Given that this is very complicated and cannot be policed I do not think it should be permitted (from the community repository, but from their own website they can do as they please).
I think that premium theme authors are a valued part of the community and so should be permitted advertising space in order to advertise to the community, but, not as part of any product that is provided through the community, and clearly marked. Theme prices should be lowered accordingly to reflect the value of the advertising that the community is providing.
These are views I have come to by thinking through the principles. I have excluded any reference to the individual’s involved in the premium theme market, the repository, or any other aspect and I have very explicitly excluded any reference to the GPL as I think it is a sofa sized red herring in the whole debate.
Obviously the answers I have come up with a very theoretical as well and certainly wouldn’t be usable in the real world, but by coming up with these answers I understand better where I stand and why it is that I felt that the decision to remove themes that link back to sites offering paid services was a reasonable one in the first place (assuming that that was the intention).
Spot on!….
[...] Andrew Rickmann who I consider to be a ‘thought leader‘ within the WordPress community published an excellent post which has had my head churning through thoughts and ideas ever since I read it. The article goes [...]
How about an apt/dpkg based upgrade path? I am using something like this locally for my own Drupal and Wordpress installs, and it works like a charm. I don't think it'd be too much of a hassle expanding it and writing a web frontend for it.
[...] Andrew Rickmann who I consider to be a ‘thought leader‘ within the WordPress community published an excellent post which has had my head churning through thoughts and ideas ever since I read it. The article goes [...]
I am sure I read that someone was writing a plugin to allow plugins to specify an update location for precisely this reason.
It certainly is possible. Habari, the project I am involved with, has built an update/installation method that isn't tied to any one point. Every Linux distro follows the same path. There is nothing technologically based that stops this from working in the WordPress space.
Nothing.
[...] quién considero un ‘líder innovador‘ dentro de la comunidad de WordPress, publicó un magnífico post qué ha hecho que mi cabeza sea un remolino de pensamientos e ideas desde que lo leí. [...]
@Improving the Web,
I don't see how it will be possible. You need a single place to check for updates.
Plugin authors should add their plugins to the repository.
Your argument would hold stake, if there were charges or mandatory links back to wp.org or Automattic involved in WordPress. There aren't. WP demonstrates, rather clearly, that an Open Source project can be financially successful without charging for the code involved or including mandatory links.
Automattic's immediate success as a Open Source centered business stems from its established ability to create valuable software. Having proven this, business is attracted not through mandatory links or a direct revenue stream, but through a third channel – Open Source as a means of portfolio. I do believe, that the benefits of exposure to hundreds of thousands of potential users via the Plugin repository alone, is worth its pageviews in gold in this scenario, giving authors not only a huge boost by open association with a wildly successful project, but also a means to show openly their craftsmanship. Revenue – and I know this to be the case in my business – can be created from this placement and association without using my users as link bait providers or charging for my Open Source work directly.
[...] plugins, etc., was a good (or even legal) thing. Jeff Chandler recently pointed to a post entitled What’s the point of community? which I think goes back to the discussion I had with Tarus Balog of OpenNMS fame a while ago, about [...]
[...] Andrew Rickmann who I consider to be a ‘thought leader‘ within the WordPress community published an excellent post which has had my head churning through thoughts and ideas every since I read it. The article goes [...]
The way the world is going, I think changing peoples approach to “profit in the way they typically seek it” is a very good thing. While I'm not suggesting premium theme developers are anywhere on par with insurance companies, health care R&D drug labs or patent trolls, it is possible to build a sustainable business model based around Wordpress in which you can still support the open source ideals that allowed Wordpress to grow in the first place.
“I think that premium theme authors are a valued part of the community and so should be permitted advertising space in order to advertise to the community, but, not as part of any product that is provided through the community, and clearly marked.” I agree with this with the caveat that the licensing which the themes are sold under is agreeable to the GPL licensing of the product on which they are a derivative of. You might push that further to suggest that anyone is free to use Wordpress to practice capitalism as long as they are willing to acknolwedge they are benefitting from the socialistic tendencies on which it is based.
They are free to omit them, but in the case of plugins, I would really like it so that even plugins that aren't in the plugin repository could benefit from the automatic upgrading.
That's a huuge disadvantage for these types of plugins.
“I think premium theme authors, [...] deserve to be compensated for that effort above and beyond the content that the community provides”
I agree completely, and I largely agree with many of your other impressions. It's simply a shame that premium theme developers chose to participate in a community where the necessary licensing of their themes would not only exclude them from profit in the way they typically seek it, but exclude them from being listed due to policies in how the wordpress.org site is run.
Whether it's in the best interest for the community or not might factor into the decision, but ultimately what is allowed in the repository should ultimately be decided by the site owner, not the community. What would be ideal is if the community owned the site and, perhaps more importantly, the brand, which it most certainly does not. In either case, I'd still argue that omitting non-GPL plugins/themes from the repo is good for the project. Leading by example is always best.