A while ago we released a free theme, SpringLoaded, which got picked up for use on Wordpress.com. No-one from Automattic contacted us about this, the first we heard was through a blog posts announcing it’s addition.

Now it’s had incredibly wide adoption, we’re swamped with support requests for various additions/tweaks, to the point that we’ve just discontinued the theme and all support for it. Anyway, my point is that this and many other themes are powerful selling points for Wordpress.com, yet Automattic are simply pillaging the themes, with no offer of support for the developers. I’ve contributed something to Wordpress.com, about 20 hours work on the SpringLoaded theme in fact, yet they give nothing back.

If Automattic were really driven on supporting the community, they’d have put a revenue sharing plan in place to support all the theme designers/developers who’s work has gone into making Wordpress.com a profitable platform.

How can you realistically expect developers to not charge for themes or plugins, you need to share some of the revenue you’re generating from their work.

Now that WordPress’ ecosystem has reached critical mass, adding value to projects like WPMU with BuddyPress – and there’s a neat market for it now, but only now – some people want a slice of the pie. That’s OK, Automattic never said it was forbidden. You just can’t do what you want, there are rules, thank god.

By the same token it’s easy to criticize the GPL. It certainly doesn’t facilitate selling software. But hey! Would WordPress have grown that big without it? It’s a bit easy to say “we want change” now. It is certainly more difficult to play by the GPL rules and the temptation is great.

If the news spread that gold was to be found in large quantities in the YellowStone Park, surely quite a few people would like its status to be changed to allow private mining.

Not so cool, or would it be?

I feel that’s the situation WordPress finds itself in right now.
It’s always easy to criticize a leader. Matt is a leader, and a pretty good one. The pressure will keep raising in the years to come.

Selling plugins is a bit like mining for the easy gold. I mean, sure, it takes time to develop proper plugins for an ever richer framework such as WordPress, and time is money.
I suggest developing plugins for clients then giving back the code to the community is a proper way to do it.
Developing plugins for the sake of selling them directly isn’t. My intuition is that it might kill the goose with the golden eggs.

Lumberjacks in the Amazonian forest have good reasons too. Felling trees is easy, you make fast money. Growing them, on the other hand, takes time and requires a special kind of spirit: you have to think about the future of the whole ecosystem, not just about your private interests.

I’m only too happy to see that the WordPress community “authorities” aren’t as powerless as the environmental organizations.
Are they hypocritical?
They don’t sell plugins, nor do they sell themes, right? They do sell services, on the other hand.
Which is way tougher.

(Please don’t bring the Akismet debate to the table again: it is a service & there is code, server side, that isn’t meant to be distributed: read the GPL, in such a case there is no need to disclose it at all. It is completely legitimate and acts as a protection against value depreciation. Selling software on the other hand is not a service. It is a product sale, quick & dirty. Like timber. )

I just want to share my experience that wordpress feels much better organized and offers far fewer headaches in terms of themes and plugins that drupal. drupal is a much wider-reaching tool so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison yet some developers are considering both to solve similar problems. and it’s natural that drupal would be more complex to use since it offers a wider range of options.

I don’t have enough experience to address the comparison of automattic vs aquia but this post was very useful in getting a critical perspective. i will have more to say on the topic of ocmmunity after drupalcon in san francisco in april.

thanks for sharing your perspective.

Commercial developers have *every right* under the GPL to sell their code and *every right* NOT to “contribute” back to the community.

True. But if people want to isolate themselves from the project, they shouldn’t complain when we preferentially promote those who maintain ties with the community and freely share their code.

Your point about the GPL as opposed to WordPress ideals is well-taken. We’ve made the plugin/theme directory on WordPress.org zero-cost in addition to GPL, not because the GPL (or even the “spirit of the GPL”) demands it, but because we think it is best for the community. Matt doesn’t stand alone on that, nor is he the only one with input on those policies.

We had instances of there being “placeholder” plugins in our repository that basically just did compatibility checks and then pointed you to a paywall on a third party site. We had (and have) plugins that embed SEO-spammy links in a user’s blog without their permission, and we’re in the process of curbing that sort of “less-than-forthcoming” behavior. Matt was involved with some parts of those conversations, but a lot of it happened without him in our weekly (open) IRC chat (and it included some of the developers of the plugins in question).

I agree that the wordpress.org site (as opposed to WordPress the project) is historically the least diversely controlled aspect of WP, but that’s definitely changing. If you have a specific issue about the site, put it on the agenda for one of our weekly chats.

“Besides, it is nobody’s God-given right to be linked from the homepage of our plugin directory and mu.wordpress.org.”

Of course, this statement is true.

The problem, though, is perception – primarily, the perception that, for wordpress.org, you are, and act like, God. Making a somewhat snarky statement like the one quoted above does nothing to improve that perception.

On the other hand, what *would* help that perception would be:

1) Establish a truly independent community council to control wordpress.org

2) Establish, define, and publish, specific, unambiguous requirements and criteria for inclusion in the free/commercial theme/plugin repositories and for being linked from wordpress.org

3) Establish a mechanism for appealing decisions regarding those requirements and criteria.

Further, you could help improve the Matt-is-WordPress-God perception by properly separating adherence to GPL and adherence to WordPress community ethos (incorrectly referred to as the “spirit” of the GPL).

You use the GPL as a hammer to enforce your own open-source ideals, and in so doing you abuse the GPL. Commercial developers have *every right* under the GPL to sell their code and *every right* NOT to “contribute” back to the community.

If the ethos of the WordPress community includes not profiting from selling GPL code and contributing back to the community, that is all well and good. Just stop calling it the “spirit” of the GPL. Call it what it is: your personal ideal, and a community standard.

But then maybe that’s the problem? If it is properly separated from the GPL, perhaps it won’t quite be the community “standard” that you would like it to be? I don’t know.