Drama Around the GPL

There’s a bunch of drama going on in the Word­press com­mu­nity right now over the GPL.

I’ll be hon­est, I don’t under­stand the whole story–I only live at the fringe of the Word­press world. But I fol­low a cou­ple Word­press rock­stars on Twit­ter: GPL advo­cate Ian Stew­art and GPL opposer Nathan Rice (hon­estly, Nathan’s posi­tion is sub­stan­tially more com­plex than that–I’m sim­pli­fy­ing for the sake of argument).

A few days ago, they had a bat­tle royale on Twit­ter over the GPL, and later some brief dis­cus­sion over this article’s claim that the GPL is bad for Wordpress.

Two inter­est­ing things strike me here:

1. This whole debate hasn’t been picked up by Slash­dot and the peo­ple oppos­ing the GPL (because peo­ple could take their pre­mium, pay-to-play, themes and redis­trib­ute them for free) mocked for not under­stand­ing the GPL in the first place.I’m not argu­ing that they should be mocked, just that’s its supris­ing it hasn’t happened.I will say, though, that I don’t under­stand what theme cre­ators and sell­ers expected to hap­pen as they move towards the GPL–the GPL has always been about giv­ing the peo­ple with your code the free­dom to do what they want with it (as long as they don’t lock it up).
2. I’m suprised at how valu­able the com­mu­nity is to these peo­ple. In fact, I can’t help but won­der if it’s not more impor­tant than the code itself.When I read the arti­cle I linked to above, my first gut response was “If you don’t like the way things are, just fork it–it’s GPL’ed!“But the more I thought about it, the more I real­ized that fork­ing isn’t nec­es­sar­ily an option–the issue isn’t a dis­sat­i­fac­tion with the code; it’s a dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the com­mu­nity around the code, and the way that com­mu­nity is being forced to use the GPL for everything.This slides pretty quickly into the clas­sic BSD vs. GPL argu­ment, ie. which is more free, a licesnse that pre­serves free­dom indef­i­nitely or a license that gives indef­i­nite free­dom (includ­ing the free­dom to end freedom).

   I have no desire to weigh in on that debate, nor do I think I have any author­ity to sug­gest which is more appro­pri­ate for Word­press (I tend to think that a BSD-style would be bet­ter, but things get murky really fast when you’re talk­ing about web appli­ca­tions, so I don’t really know).

In any case, I’ll give kudos to Ian Stew­art and his The­matic project, which posi­tions itself pretty clearly as theme built on the ideas behind the GPL. The­matic is a theme designed to built upon, as a sort of library that new themes can link in, some­thing that will do a lot of the heavy (and bor­ing) lift­ing free­ing up the author of the new theme to work on the fun stuff.

In so doing, Ian has cre­ated not a new theme, but a new mar­ket with him­self as the market-share holder: the cus­tom The­matic theme cre­ation and sup­port mar­ket. It might not (yet) be as lucra­tive as sim­ply sell­ing themes for $50/pop, but he’s cer­tainly the per­son I’d try to hire if I had the bud­get to build an impor­tant blog on Wordpress.

A few days ago, I read this blog entry by a soft­ware devel­oper. He writes:

To be totally hon­est I don’t have a lot of sym­pa­thy for cap­i­tal­ists who say “you’re doing some­thing that makes it hard for me to make money in the way that I’ve grown used to mak­ing money.” Cap­i­tal­ist’ lack of cre­ativ­ity is not a flaw in the Free Soft­ware movement.

This is the prob­lem with using the GPL for Wordpress–it puts a big dent in a busi­ness model built around the project in the name of pre­serv­ing inno­va­tion.

Ian under­stands this and is build­ing his lively hood and rep­u­ta­tion online around this idea–he’s mak­ing money in a new way, pre­serv­ing his live­ly­hood and the cul­ture of free­dom and inno­va­tion that the GPL demands. That’s the kind of new busi­ness mod­els we need.