WordPress Theme and Plugin Licensing

March 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

There has been a whole lot of talk in the WordPress Community in recent months about WordPress theme and plugin licensing and I bet your pretty pink boots if you’re making themes or sites for clients, it’s something you’ve barely given a thought about. Because most of the issues in the news have centered around distribution and don’t affect client work.

However, if you’re making things to distribute, you should think about it… because if you want to make some money out of your theme or your plugin and/or if you want a lot of people to know about your theme or plugin you have some decisions to make about just how you allow that software to be distributed or reused.

WordPress itself and the core of the whole story, is licensed under GPL (GNU Public License1). In short, this means that if you’re using WordPress you have the following four freedoms

the freedom to use the software for any purpose,
the freedom to change the software to suit your needs,
the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, and
the freedom to share the changes you make.2
This is the essence of free software (free as in speech (libre) not to be confused with free as in beer, (gratis)3).

Filed Under: Intellectual Property, WordPress

Copyright Class #2

August 23, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Here’s a link to the slideshow from last week. Some of the transitions are a bit off… Links to the two videos in the Fair Use Section are below.

Copyright Class #2
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Filed Under: Intellectual Property

Copyright Class #1

August 4, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Here’s Part One of it on Youtube, the subsequent parts are also available there

Filed Under: Intellectual Property

5 Things you may not Know about Copyright

July 24, 2011 by Leave a Comment

I’m prepping for a couple of lectures on Digital Copyright Issues… The notes may as well double as blog posts…

  1. The world’s first copyright statute was the Statue of Anne – enacted April 10, 1710 – The statute protected the interests of authors and proprietors of existing books for 21 years from the date of publication and gave owners of new works sole liberty of printing and reprinting such a book for the term of 14 years. The statute offered a right of renewal of a further 14 years after the first expired if the author/owner was still alive, no such renewal was available if the book was already in print.
  2. The original intent of the Statute of Anne was not so much the restriction of copying but the encouragement of creation. Giving people the right to profit from a work was intended to encourage people to continue working on creative projects.
Filed Under: Intellectual Property