When WordPress is started, it executes various routines that prepare information for use by themes. In normal use, control is then transferred via PHP’s include() function to HTML and PHP templates found in theme package files. The PHP code in those template files relies on the earlier-prepared information to fill the templates for serving to the client. On the basis of that version of WordPress, and considering those themes as if they had been added to WordPress by a third party, it is our opinion that the themes presented, and any that are substantially similar, contain elements that are derivative works of the WordPress software as well as elements that are potentially separate works.Chris cited lawyer Mike Was's blog and opinion that GPL does not extend to WordPress themes due to Fair Use guidelines and things ratcheted up when he claimed he is one of the top 3 most important figures in the history of WordPress and told Matt "Either you sue me or you don't. Or you continue to talk, or you don't."
Drupal, another GPL system is of the opinion that themes and modules built for their CMS are also derivative works.Actually, it's less that "we are of the opinion..." and more "we talked to lots of lawyers and came to the conclusion there was no way around this."
The GNU General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General Public License instead of this License. (source)I'm not qualified to assess whether the text of the GPL actually backs that up, but I tend to assume that the FSF's lawyers are.
I've read several versions of the GPL and written a lot of software and I don't think either of these is obviously true (at least not from a legal standpoint.)I'll be honest, the four days I spent discussing this with the lawyers destroyed any desire I have to discuss this specific point with anyone, ever again.
Lots of people, including me, who love open source hate the GPL and one of the reasons is that the provisions don't really match up with intuition about how "open" software should work.This basically boils down to, "If the GPL were really open, it would allow people to use it to do non-open things." That's a philosophical discussion. To me, the value of the existing GPL-licensed software I use and the communities around those pieces of software are more valuable than the potential for closing my code and selling it under a different license.
patch(1) is open source by definition, no? A PHP programmer could read and understand the unpatched code, the text of the diff, and the patched source after patch(1) was used to apply the patch.Two pieces of software: WordPress with a GPL license, and Thesis with a closed-source license. In separate universes, each is fine. But by combining them together -- by installing Thesis on a copy of WordPress such that their code combines and executes as one combined PHP program scattered over several files -- a "derivative work" of both WordPress and Thesis is being created.The lawyers we spoke to concluded that "Only if you redistribute" was a reasonable answer if the closed-source software was a free standing functional program capable of running on its own. For example, if I wrote a closed-source playlist management script in PHP, and a user wired it into their copy of WordPress, a case could be made that they're exercising their rights to tweak the software running on their server.
Only an issue if you redistribute. I would assume that the Thesis license explicitly forbids you from redistributing Thesis+Wordpress.
Copying code into his theme clearly isn't kosher. Claiming that an extension to a collection of scripts is a derivative work is a total nightmare of legal wrangling.The GPL doesn't claim that, though. It claims that extensions which effectively become part of the program result in the creation of a derivative work.
I guess my point would be that if the target audience needs to spend four days talking to lawyers to determine their liability maybe there are some problems with your license.Also, to clarify, that four days was us -- the people who had written the GPL software -- trying to figure out if we could in some way get around this aspect of the GPL without sacrificing the positive aspects of the license that HAVE helped our community considerably. We came to the conclusion that "GPL + Addendum" would work, but not "GPL." For other reasons this was untenable, but that's about getting seven hundred code contributors (co-owners of the code, essentially) to all agree on an addendum. That's another matter, unrelated to the license itself.
Another thing that Drupal's "opinion" does well is clarify the difference between code and non-code. Non-code isn't covered by GPL, and almost all themes contain non-code elements (images, stylesheets, etc.) without which the theme would be pretty useless. So this whole kerfluffle could be easily avoided by simply claiming only the non-code elements of themes are outside GPL (and therefor not okay to redistribute). That's pretty much what happens in the Drupal community, and it seems to protect everyone's interests well enough.This is the approach that has worked out really well for Top Notch Themes, a Drupal premium template/theme company. The PHP source for their themes is designed as a reusable, customizable framework that gives designers a lot of flexibility with the underlying structure. They've released that component under the GPL, and they even actively promote it as a tool for other people to use when making custom designs from scratch.
+-----------+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------+ | linked | | | | code's | if you distribute the result | if you do NOT distribute | |license is?| of linking, then you must... | the result of linking, then... | +-----------+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------+ | GPL | license your code as GPL | no legal obligation | +-----------+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------+ | LGPL | no legal obligation | no legal obligation | +-----------+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
This isn't necessarily true... are those pieces of code effectively the only way to interface with wordpress?I have no idea whether he did or not -- the one snippet I saw looked ambiguous. That's why I'm ignoring the "did he include actual WordPress code in Thesis" question in most of my analysis. If he took WP code and built on top of it, Thesis would itself be derivative. If he didn't, WordPressPlusThesis would be a derivative work made of two works with competing and incompatible licenses.
While some members of the OSS community take the FSF's definitions on faith there is a good deal of disagreement about the minutiae.Given that the FSF actually wrote the GPL, that projects choosing the GPL do so voluntarily, that the FSF releases new versions of the GPL (or purpose-specific variants of the GPL) when there are actual "holes" discovered in the license, and that most of the people angry about the GPL's implications are angry because they want to use GPL'd software without respecting the intent of the license, I think that referring to the self-described intent of the lawyers employed to work on the GPL is a bad approach.
And a derivative work is defined by law, not the FSF. If the FSF wanted their interpretation they should have been explicit.And their lawyers have been explicit about this. They do not believe that additional changes to the GPL itself are necessary to clarify this point, and other companies have backed down when challenged.
The FSF does not speak for all open source developersNo, but their lawyers can certainly speak authoritatively about the legal document that they authored.
For that matter, how do you expect ANY lawyer to speak authoritatively about the GPL when there have been no real cases tried on any of the unclear things? Things arn't clear until they are in court.There are a number of cases both in the US and internationally that have touched on issues of distribution, derivation, and the general "solidness" of the GPL as a legal document. To the best of my knowledge, the GPL has held up in every instance.
For that matter, how do you expect ANY lawyer to speak authoritatively about the GPL when there have been no real cases tried on any of the unclear things? Things arn't clear until they are in court.THANK YOU. I actually support Pearsonified on this. Most people despise him because he's a cocky d-bag. Fine, I can understand that viewpoint entirely (though I actually get a kick out of him).
If I had to guess, I'd say the GPL is to Chris Pearson what the Muslim religion is to a Catholic.Then he shouldn't have started attending a Mosque: he built his software on top of GPL licensed software, and it cannot be used without that GPL licensed software.
This is why choosing a license carefully as opposed to using a fad license is important.That is correct. But this is not a case of someone using the GPL because they didn't understand it. This is the case of someone releasing GPL software, and someone else releasing non-GPL software built on top of it because they didn't understand the GPL.
I think it's really tough to call something that's 95% original a derivative workI don't want to be an ass, but this issue is addressed upthread. Thesis is an unusable, inert chunk of code that does nothing without Wordpress. It does nothing in Wordpress' absence. Chris attempts to minimize this in the interview that's linked to in the original post, saying that WordPress "just runs some SQL queries," but if it's so minimal and unnecessary, Thesis should be able to run without it. If Thesis COULD run without WordPress, its users wouldn't be using WordPress, and there would be no problem.
I disagree. I see this as a problem where people don't understand the GPL and just assume it does what they want.Who are you talking about? Chris, who admits he didn't know what the GPL was before creating Thesis, and now declares that he doesn't care what 'the technicalities are?' Matt, who released WordPress as GPL because it is itself a derivative work of another pre-existing GPL blogging package named b2? Or are we talking about a hypothetical person unrelated to this conversation who is about to release their software as GPL because all the cool kids are doing it?
The GPL has always had these gray areas, it is just that the FSF doesn't like talking about them.Really? I had no problem getting their lawyers to talk to me for days about this specific issue, drilling into very specific details of how PHP, C, and web services work, doing code reviews, and so on. They don't mind talking about these things, some people just don't like their answers.
Thesis is an unusable, inert chunk of code that does nothing without Wordpress.Don't worry about being an ass. I appreciate your insight.
Combination is not sufficient for derivative work. By that logic a java program is a derivative of a hotspot virtual machine.The word "combining" is not a magic word, no. Please note that I specifically said they must be combined into a single executable PHP script at runtime. From a technical perspective, there is absolutely no difference between the code written by Chris and the code written by Matt at the time that the code runs. PHP loads them all, and creates a single executable program out of them, and that program builds an HTML web page.
As a web designer though, my siding with Chris (or moreso against GPL) comes mainly from the fact that I could create a totally original interface, but the minute it's skinned onto WordPress it's GPL?Nope. According to the lawyers I have consulted with (not simply folks from the FSF, as some have suggested), the PHP code specifically would become part of a derivative work and would have to be GPL'd in order to be legally distributed. The image assets, CSS, javascript, etc however would not need to be licensed under the GPL. Those are not combined into a single executable program -- they are support assets that are loaded by an end user's web browser.
There is no reason to believe dependency == derivative. It is a myth invented by GPL advocates.No, it's invented by the text of the GPL. You can argue about whether it's enforceable, or whether the FSF is full of assholes,
You mean like how dll's are loaded into the same memory space as a program and therefore the two are literally combined into a single program which is then executed. I find it unlikely a judge would base a ruling on interpreted vs compiled.The DLL linking issue is specifically dealt with in the GPL and clarified by the FSF's FAQs on the topic.
i have a bone to pick with developers who eschew design and usability but i have a bigger hammer to wield with designers who think their CSS is greater than the actual source code of the platform their work is useless without.To encapsulate design with color crayons and CSS is nonsensical. Applications are designed. Systems are designed. Where intellectual property is involved – technology, music, art, science, etc. – we're all taking existing things and creating entirely new things. Sometimes it's .05% new, other times revolutionary.
If I write my own custom elf loader that loads my own custom code into your gpl code at runtime and hooks into the appropriate functions to redirect control flow to my code when appropriate ... is my code GPL?No, it is not GPL'd unless you release it under the GPL. But if we accept that the two programs are tied together in a way that makes them a single derivative work, you would not be able to distribute that combined work without violating the terms of the GPL that part of the work is licensed under.
No? Then you're distributing Y with the intent of the user linking it into X and running the whole thingThis happens all the time, but doesn't negate the fact that there's original, written, copyrightable material involved. Just because something only works as an extension of something else doesn't necessarily mean it originated out of the source. *whew, really getting hard to articulate these minute facets of this argument*as a derived worktogether.
verb wrote: If I have GPL eggs, and you have closed-source flour, it is impossible to create a legally licensed cake from those ingredients. Either the GPL's requirement that derivative works also be GPL'd is violated, or your closed-source license's requirement that your software not be redistributed is violated."Just to be really pedantic and clear (and to check my understanding): Eggs and flour are both separately useful for other things, so my understanding is that you can make this cake for your own consumption. It's when you start to sell or otherwise redistribute this cake that your flour must be GPL'd and you must provide the recipe. Right?
Just to be really pedantic and clear (and to check my understanding): Eggs and flour are both separately useful for other things, so my understanding is that you can make this cake for your own consumption. It's when you start to sell or otherwise redistribute this cake that your flour must be GPL'd and you must provide the recipe. Right?Yes! Totally correct! 100%! That is the position of the FSF and the SFLC lawyers that we consulted with.
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posted by kuatto at 7:34 AM on July 16, 2010 [4 favorites]