Earlier today, Mark Ghosh of weblogtoolscollection.com posted “Turning the other cheek“. This post brought up the fact that the majority of the WP user community stands behind the initiative to remove sponsored themes from the major theme repositories, while the noisy few, those who distribute sponsored themes are now resorting to hate tactics, such as personal attacks and even immature actions like name calling.
Also, today, Matt Mullenweg posted “Price of Freedom” on his blog in response to a designer who used encrypted PHP in the footer of their designs. Initially, the designer’s objections seemed to have some merit, but after further reading of Matt’s post and the comments that follow it, it was clear what the designer was concerned about and attribution isn’t what comes to mind.
I especially like Matt’s post as it clearly states the strength of Open Source. There are three particular points that I would like to quote here…
- Give people the tools they need to succeed. This can be interpreted on a lot of levels, but personally I’ve found at the most base the freedoms provided by the GPL and other open source licenses are incredibly empowering.
- Celebrate the successes. Talk, connect, promote, and embrace the people who are creating things on top of your creation. (The best revenge against someone doing something bad is helping create something awesome.)
- Provide a way for people to choose to help you, and try to remove as much friction from that process as possible. Now that you’ve ignored the bad people and delighted the good, by their very nature they’ll want to give something back.
Wise words to say the least.
Mark’s and Matt’s poise in the face of this adversity is to be applauded. While I’m new’ish to WP, I’ve been around Open Source Software long enough to where I have been in their shoes. I know all too well what it is like to face an enormous amount of criticism from a large community.
Gentlemen, my hat is off to you. You have my full support!
While this whole scenario seems almost a bit too soap opera’ish for my tastes, especially after being caught up in too much drama at a previous OSS project, I can’t help but to take a strong stance on this one as I feel it’s impact reaches far beyond a single OSS project. IMHO, it is a precedent that needs to be set.
I have no objections to corporate sponsorship and involvement in OSS projects. Quite the contrary. However, when sponsorship and involvement begin to erode the fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the GPL and compatible licenses, then I must object.
Like many of you, I will be following this story closely.
