Are WordPress.org culturally anti-business?

[andreasnrb]

There is not any rules stating that you can't include something about yourself in the readme.
You might be able to do something like Mailchimp and alex king did with the Analytics 360 plugin.

MailChimp offers other services for WordPress users, too. A list subscribe plugin allows you to easily add a signup form for your MailChimp list as a widget on your blog, and RSS-to-email sends automatic email campaigns to your readers whenever you publish a new post.
Learn more at MailChimp.com.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/analytics360/

[JohnM]

Preconfigure a feed to news about the theme in the dashboard, with a smart marketing sig in your feed posts. It should be as effective as any readme.txt copy, and no way they can say no-no.

[JohnM]

Include readme copy which in a smart way says that this is a theme you may have confidence in cause its possible to have support by theme authors.

[davecoveney]

@DD32 - I actually started that one! Didn't quite expect the storm that followed, or the attention it generated!

@JohnM - thanks for the PM, I've responded. You're right that we should start looking elsewhere, however, actually concentrating on WP has been to our benefit and we've helped get the system into some very high profile firms. But WP's problem is a little similar to Apple's (http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune....us-pr-problem/) which is that they have hundreds of suppliers who are starting to feel a little itchy. If dealing with a company becomes a bit like dealing with a moody teenager whose opinions may change from day to day then a supplier starts to wonder if there are easier people to work with.

@Jeffro - yes, I did get to have a good chat with Matt. Nice lad, full of the idealism that youth brings and he reminded me of my age as I realised that I've been coding since before he was born. Eeek! But I had to laugh when we first met and said "Oh, you're the guy who thinks I'm the devil!" It's absolutely not true - I just think he's a guy looking after his own interests. He's running a business - that's the idea! But we had a good and friendly chat and a photo taken of us together makes us look like old friends.

I do appreciate his position and his attempts to keep everyone involved on his side. But he plays a tricky balancing act - on the one hand he's doing his best to keep a GPL project going with lots of free time contributions, and on the other he's running a very well capitalised company with quite a lot of staff. A big risk is that the key non-paid but highly talented contributors think he's too soft on the GPL and so they walk... then he needs to spend significantly more on paid developers. And developer time is ferociously expensive. He was to walk a fine line between continuing community involvement and keeping the businessfolk onside too. Both are valuable to WordPress, both need to be kept happy, but I think some of the free time contributors feel antsy at the thought of others making money or wanting to do so. They seem to accept Automattic doing so, but see their contribution as being big.

@Rarst - I believe that my paragraph before explains the ultimate problem - those giving their time for free are going to feel uncomfortable with those who are getting paid for it or who seek to get paid for it. You get similar politicisation in charities, where a lot of donors seem to feel that the staff of charities receiving an income is somehow a bad thing. It's not nice to see this happen, and it puts some charities back quite a bit.

@Chip - yep :-)

@JohnM - funny enough we were recently talking about using dashboard feeds... I think that's got to be one of the best ways forwards.

@Andreas - absolutely. I've emailed back and we'll see what they say.

[JohnM]

You're right that we should start looking elsewhere, however, actually concentrating on WP has been to our benefit and we've helped get the system into some very high profile firms.

My point is that in a business strategy its important to not be too dependent on a variable which may change. I`m not saying that you should look for something to replace WP in your business but its some other CMS system as well, where you may use the same core knowhow as with WP services.

[carlhancock]

We had Dovetail rejected from the WordPress repository because in the readme file it mentions that we can customise themes, or create custom themes.

Now, I'm not going to make a fuss about this - we'll just remove the line. Frankly, nobody really reads these files - especially in these days of auto-installed themes. However, it does make me wonder about whether or not WordPress.org is culturally anti-business?

After all, they don't like themes with links to sponsors or sites offering non-GPL services (regardless of whether those services are correct within the GPL or not) and the listing of commercial themes clubs took a long time to happen in a satisfactory way and not without a fair amount of bad feeling and arguments beforehand.

Why are themes like VIGILANCE by Jestro able to promote and upsell "Premium" services from within their themes (install Vigilance and go to the Options panel it installs) but you can't do the same thing in the README file? What's up with that?

They even display options that don't work unless you pay for the PRO membership with Jestro Themes. It's a good idea, i'm knocking Jestro. Just wondering what the difference is between you promoting services in the README file and Jestro promoting services in the Theme's dashboard options.

[Leland]

Why are themes like VIGILANCE by Jestro able to promote and upsell "Premium" services from within their themes (install Vigilance and go to the Options panel it installs) but you can't do the same thing in the README file? What's up with that?

They even display options that don't work unless you pay for the PRO membership with Jestro Themes. It's a good idea, i'm knocking Jestro. Just wondering what the difference is between you promoting services in the README file and Jestro promoting services in the Theme's dashboard options.

Honestly I'm surprised a "limited" theme like this would be approved in the first place. How exactly do they make it so features don't work unless you pay?

But rejecting a theme based on a line of a readme file about providing services related to the theme? Seriously?

[chipbennett]

Dovetail readme.txt wast much out of line, but its ok to have a strict policy, to avoid grayhat marketeers gaming the repository. The readme.txt should contain info about the theme, nothing else.

I disagree.

Automattic (or whomever you want to call the ultimate overseers of wordpress.org website and its theme/plugin repositories) already restrict commercial behavior enough as it is.

Should reasonable guidelines be set? Absolutely. But this nothing-at-all; our-way-or-the-highway approach has got to stop.

[JohnM]

I might have gotten it wrong here, thought the readme.txt was used as with plugins, its the text that gets published on wp.org, but its not is it ?

[davecoveney]

Hi John - you are indeed wrong, the readme.txt content is not published on wp.org - it's just a file included in the zip which people can read for further information. The vast majority never open it.

The paragraph of text you see describing the theme comes from style.css - I wouldn't dream of getting commercial in there. Never even occurred to me.

I thought I'd mentioned it, but looks like I haven't - I emailed the themes guys back last weekend suggesting that it was an unfair approach they were taking. No responses.

By being like this they're likely to suffer in the same way that Apple are with their App Store. Developers can't be sure whether their work will be accepted, even if it's high quality and desirable. There's little in the way of an appeals process and emails are often stonewalled. As Chip puts it, the our-way-or-the-highway approach has got to stop. I love open source - it's a wonderful way of enhancing the net worth of all of us, but when contributions (because that's what a theme is) are actively pushed away it gives a motivation to look elsewhere.