I was listening to part of the GPL discussion at WordCamp NYC 2009 yesterday. Basically it featured Brian Gardner (founder of Revolution and then Studio Press Themes) and Grant Griffiths (co-founder of the new Headway Themes), going head to head on the GPL issue in regard to WordPress “Premium Themes”. Gardner started as a non-GPL premium theme provider and he switched to be fully GPL compliant. Which means he went “legit” and became a legal theme maker. And you ask “who cares”? If I build a site for a law firm using a non-GPL compliant theme are they going to care? Probably not. Will they get sued because of it? Almost certainly not.
Then why don’t I even try Headway after hearing all the buzz about it?
Well, for starters, they force you to agree when you purchase the theme for the so called “personal option” to:
- NOT Remove the footer credit
- NOT Redistribute in any way, shape, or form
- pay a minimum of $87 to play… there is no free version
They’ve got a lot of moxie to use open source code to sell proprietary code and it’s in exceedingly poor taste to force users into a link back. As if this was a “kid developer” selling scripts on HotScripts that included some kind of chinsey linking scheme as part of the payment. Having a PR3 on their young homepage compared to Studio Presses PR6 right now we can guess why. The truth of the matter is that PR3 on their homepage is perfectly normal right now considering their age and they are getting a lot of buzz right now from users who want to use premium themes but they find Studio Press too difficult to use. I think they should just play it cool like a mature player and drop the link back requirement in their licensing. They are catering to a crowd of non-developers that will probably give a link with out being forced to anyway. The non-distribute part of their licensing agreement is funny. I’m laughing. I’d love to see them sue someone for violating the license agreement that they made by violating the spirit of the GPL licensing agreement.
But the biggest reason for me is that I purchased the developer license for Revolution, REV2, and Studio Press which are all evolutionary Brian Gardner products and I can go nuts making sites for commercial clients. I spent a lot of money for those developer lics but I got a lot of different great themes and the absolute best support in the premium themes business. Headway wants to charge a fee for a developer license and then ON TOP of that a PER CLIENT FEE for each commercial client you have. Wow. It’s totally unenforceable in practice IMHO but if I did play ball it would have cost me an extra thousand dollars for the number of client sites I’ve rolled out so far.
With a GPL compliant WordPress Theme, I can use it for free. My friends at work can try it for free or use it commercially for free. But I can’t even test Headway unless I spend almost 100 bucks for the “personal option” and then I have to play games and give them a mandatory link back to their homepage so I don’t violate the license agreement and subsequently break the law.
Headway features look nice and I’d like to try them.
But I’m NOT going to shell out almost a hundred bucks to try a theme. I’m going to find a few Headway Themes in the wild and check their built in SEO capabilities against the hugely popular AllInOneSEO plugin that most professional SEO’s like myself use on standard commercial client rollouts. You know the Headway guys are onto some solid ideas and they may push the envelope for other premium theme developers. But until they make a GPL version I think they are not playing fair to use the hard work of hundreds of developers who made WordPress for the benefit of the world for free, and I’m not going to try it at the tune of a hundred bucks a pop for a non-commercial developer lic.
(I was not paid by any vendor or individual for any of my comments in this post)
Here is a David Risley vid on Headway under the hood.
