THE PENDING DRAFT

This is fundamentally different from general commerce and normal software licenses. And when you try to apply general commerce principles to GPL products, things get messed up in a hurry. The whole revenue model and philosophy of cost-per-item simply doesn’t work under GPL because the product itself is free. In place of the product being the commodity, it is the service that is sold.

If you work with WordPress and were not living under a rock for the past week, you’ve heard of the “GPL-War” going on between Envato authors and the WordPress Foundation. It all started (again) with Jake Caputo being banned from speaking at a WordCamp because he sells his themes on envato’s Themeforest, which isn’t fully GPL-compatible. Lots have been written about it, WPdaily did a good job in covering the whole story and opinions from different angles.

In this article on Design is Philosophy Morten Rand-Hendriksen raises the questions about who owns WordPress and how one can still earn money in a GPL-World. It’s all about services instead of licenses. Worth a read!

Who owns WordPress? or How to Make Money in a GPL Universe. – Design is Philosophy.