OK, I’m a logical guy. Everybody has to make a living. That’s cool. I can respect that, but there is a trend taking place among some Wordpress theme developers that, IMHO, is unethical and is detrimental not only to the user but the designer.
In the post “Sponsored†themes and the post No Sponsored themes on WeblogToolsCollection Mark Ghosh makes a clear stance against sponsored themes and I have to agree with his stance. To go a step further, I’m going to implement the same policy on MyWebResource as well. Here’s why…
Attribution is one thing, capitalism is something completely different. Every theme I’ve released has had a link back to this site and the request that the link remain intact. As a full-time webmaster, traffic is my livelihood. Since graphics are copy written, I can make such a request. However, since my themes require a GNU/GPL or Creative Commons licensed application to work properly, I have to license them under a compatible license. That means that I can not encrypt the code so that end user cannot modify it. I can do whatever I want with the images, but I cannot encrypt the code.
I recently migrated a site over to WP and found the perfect theme for it, but in the footer, there was an encrypted PHP string that generated 3 sponsored links. My understanding is that this is a violation of the GNU/GPL license. Fortunately, the author provided the original source code, therefore vindicating them self and giving me the ability to restore the code with proper attribution to the author.
Many end users wouldn’t have a clue how to interpret the code and wouldn’t know that they could override the encrypted code with the provided source code. Therefore, the author is capitalizing on ignorance. IMHO, this isn’t cool!
Pages upon pages could be written about this subject, but before I go off on a full-out tangent, I’m going to stop and say that you will not find any design here, now, or ever, that is a “sponsored” design. Attribution is fine, but no theme here will be “sponsored”.
I hope many more webmasters and designers will stand up against this plague of leeches who are hurting Open Source design.
