By Jeffro on October 2, 2009
The GPL dominoes continue to fall as PremiumThemes.net has announced that beginning October 1st, all themes available on the site would be sold under the GPL. R.Bhavesh who operates the site had this to say regarding the switch:
While I personally don’t agree with some of the aspects of GPL license model, I think we owe a lot to the wonderful wordpress software. Since 2007, 90% of my personal earnings are coming through wordpress and it didn’t feel good to go against wordpress expectations.
Because the wordpress community encourage GPL, We would love to give in and follow the GPL license expected by wordpress founder.
Welcome Bhavesh to the GPL bandwagon, you’re in good company. While I think there is truth in the ‘me-too‘ aspect of it all, none of the theme developers that I know of who switched to the GPL model have switched back which is a good sign.
Posted in Themes | Tagged gpl, license, premium, Themes |
By Jeffro on May 11, 2009
With all of the various theme names these days, it’s getting harder to define what exactly a premium theme is. Andrew Rickmann over at Fun With WordPress tries to give us a better understanding of what premium means now a days as well as providing a valid argument that perhaps it’s time for the theme repository to have a grading system.
Making the distinction between premium themes and the degrees of theme beneath them really only lets the less than premium themes get a free ride.
So now we have premium, freemium, non-gpl, gpl, child, parent, free, commercial, *proprietary themes. Hey, at least we don’t have to worry about grand child themes!
My head hurts already from trying to think of the various classifications for a WordPress theme. By the way, proprietary is starred because that’s what Matt calls non-gpl pay for themes. At this point, I would say that themes you pay for is what I think of when I hear the word premium but after seeing Andrew give the lowdown on the top five themes on the repository, I’m beginning to think premium is just a means of describing a theme that is above par and something you don’t ALWAYS have to pay for. As if parent/child themes were not complicated enough, now we have about 50 different classifications for themes. Who’s responsible for this?!
So what do you think about a grading or classification system on the theme repository? What do you think about all of the various terms used to describe a theme?
Posted in Themes | Tagged coding, commercial, premium, quality, Themes |
By Jeffro on May 1, 2009
Ok, so here is the theoretical scenario. Theoretical because I don’t release or develop themes or plugins.
I’m a person who has created a plugin which modifies an integral part of a WordPress theme. End users end up contacting me to perform custom work with regards to implementing my plugin or their customizations to my plugin into their theme. However, in order to edit their theme, they must send it to me. This is where I had a few questions.
For you premium theme authors out their who don’t license your themes under the GPL, is it within your license for your customers to send me their theme for me to work on? If you’re not under the GPL, wouldn’t this violate their theme license because they have redistributed their theme to me in order to work on it? Am I required to immediately delete the theme once I have shipped them the finished product? Unless I am redistributing the themes my customers have provided to me to edit, how would you ever know your customer sent me their purchased theme?
Posted in Themes | Tagged gpl, premium, redistribution, Themes |
By Jeffro on April 27, 2009
Checking out the WPTavern Twitter stream early this morning, I noticed this tweet from Matt: This could be interesting for WP themes: http://wpgorilla.org/ They should add finished product to theme directory. Taking a look into the Gorilla Project, looks like they will be producing open-source ‘Premium‘ WordPress themes.
The Gorilla Project is an opensource project created by Jeremie and Chris to overcome common issues encountered by a single WordPress theme designer.
I’ve never heard of Chris before but Jeremie should be a somewhat familiar name to most of you since he is the creator of the slick looking OneRoom WordPress theme. I’m intrigued by why these two developers are going down this road essentially doing the same thing every other theme author is doing but for a price.
I mean, everything on paper regarding this project looks great from an end users perspective, I just can’t believe there is no mention of revenue or money. I would be very, very surprised if this really was a project centered around benefiting the WordPress community as a whole, only because I’ve never seen something like this. Matt even suggested that once they have a finished product available, they should put it on the Theme Repository. If OneRoom and Jeremie’s latest project PigNews is the type of design work we can expect to come out of this project to be freely accessible to anyone in the WordPress community, that will be a huge plus not only for the repository, but for the community as a whole.
I’m going to try and get a hold of one or both of these guys to figure out what the ultimate motive is behind the project either in an interview on WPWeekly or a text based interview.
They are currently looking to build their team so if you’re interested and are a theme designer, a plugin developer, a PHP Ninja or only a graphic designer email them at joinus {a-t} wpgorilla {d-o-t} org. they also ask that you please attach a link to your portfolio if you have one.
Posted in Themes | Tagged gorilla, matt mullenweg, premium, Themes |
The GPL dominoes continue to fall as PremiumThemes.net has announced that beginning October 1st, all themes available on the site would be sold under the GPL. R.Bhavesh who operates the site had this to say regarding the switch:
