WordPress Creator GPL Says WP Template Must Be GPL'd

An anonymous reader writes "Matt Mullenweg (the creator of open source blog software WordPress), after review by various legal experts, is sticking to his guns that themes and plugins that 'extend' WordPress violate the GPL if they are not themselves distributed under the GPL. Matt has gone so far as to post this on Twitter. According to Matt, the premium template called Thesis should be under the GPL and the owner is not happy about it. WordPress is willing to sue the maker of Thesis theme for not following GPL licensing. The webmasters and Thesis owners are also confused with new development. Mark Jaquith wrote an excellent technical analysis of why WordPress themes inherit the GPL. This is why even if Thesis hadn't copy-and-pasted large swathes of code from WordPress (and GPL plugins) its PHP would still need to be under the GPL."pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fyro.slashdot.org%2Fstory %2F10%2F07%2F22%2F1935248%2FWordPress-Creator-GPL-Says-WP-Template-Must-Be-GPLd" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=WordPress+Creator+GPL+Says+WP+Template +Must+Be+GPL'd%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FdcVtvV" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/07/22/1935248/WordPress-Creator-GPL-Says-WP-Template-Must-Be-GPLd?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./ppa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/dk3w6edj6I8b1uWClHyRG1NTyns/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/dk3w6edj6I8b1uWClHyRG1NTyns/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/dk3w6edj6I8b1uWClHyRG1NTyns/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/dk3w6edj6I8b1uWClHyRG1NTyns/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/WQ6_VE_QGhM" height="1" width="1"/

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