Winner? Pearson vs Mullenweg

[Ryan]

If Matt takes Chris to court over the "Thesis should be GPL" debate, who do you believe will win?

[Ipstenu]

You didn't allow for 'No one.' This would be a VERY long battle :/

[film_girl]

You didn't allow for 'No one.' This would be a VERY long battle :/

Agreed. As I said on Aaron Brazell's blog, I think the fundamental discussion of how software licenses (at least the GPL an other open source licenses that don't allow for scripting language provisions) actually work in the age of web-based languages and distribution needs to happen and that ultimately, it needs to be settled in court, but I don't think that it is an issue that will be decided based on a WordPress theme or plugin.

In any event, such a case would take a <em>very</em> long time to present and fight in court. This is one reason it hasn't happened yet. Because it's a lose lose for everyone involved. A lawsuit hurts everyone, even it is something that needs to happen to settle issues like this.

In this case, Thesis probably isn't even the best use case for actually settling the actual issue.

[andreasnrb]

No Wishlist and similar I think would be a better case.

[chipbennett]

I need to see more information first: primarily, the actual copyright infringement claims alleged by Matt/WPF. Unless/until an actual petition exists, our guesses are a bit premature.

But, I'll say this: I assume (and hope, for his sake) that Chris gets a lawyer who does a better job articulating his defense more coherently than Chris himself did yesterday.

[chipbennett]

No Wishlist and similar I think would be a better case.

In terms of starting to establish some boundaries for dependency/derivativeness (while eliminating,for the most part, the back-end-vs-front-end argument such as Chris appears to be using in part), it probably would be wise to go after a non-GPL plugin first.

[Ryan]

You didn't allow for 'No one.' This would be a VERY long battle :/

If "No one" wins, then put that under "Chris - settled out of court" as he wouldn't have to change his themes licensing and it wouldn't have been settled directly in court.


I do agree that potentially no one will win morally or financially from it (depending on the outcome), but that's not the (intended) question of the poll.

I think perhaps the question should have been "Will Thesis need to change to a GPL license if Matt takes him to court over the matter"

[Ipstenu]

Oh, no I think Matt would win a legal battle, but I don't think anyone would 'win'. Does that make sense?

[Ryan]

Yup, that makes sense.

[andrea_r]

Didn't vote. Settling is not a win.