1) Chris Pearson is vilified because he wants to license his stuff, his own way.
2) People start, with Ma.tt’s encouragement to switch to Genesis because it is 100% GPL and in the “spirit of things”.
3) Mark Jaquith states in the FAQ section on this page that “What you could do is offer a theme under a split license. The PHP would be under the GPL, but other static resources could be under some other license.” I don’t want to put words into his mouth, but I believe he and Ma.tt are on the same page.
4) So Chris eventually offers split license.
5) Ma.tt is now totally cheesed off because split isn’t good enough (not sure why he does the Syn.Thesis post about Thesis and not about Headway though . . .)
6) Genesis owner, Brian Gardner states publicly that its not slimy to give his stuff away for free, because the GPL allows it, however goes onto say this. “… they want to use countless hours of our hard work to fill their pockets. While that is allowed under the GPL, it’s clearly IMO not the “spirit””.

Conclusion I draw from all that is the GPL embodies something that isn’t in the spirit of the GPL. And you know what else? The GPL is inelegant, like a piece of badly written code. It should read something like this.

“If you build anything on WordPress it has to be GPL too. You can give your work away or charge for it – it’s up to you. The GPL allows you to do both. The GPL also allows anyone who gets a copy of your code to give it away or sell it to others. However rather than admit this is a bit annoying, we’ve coined a phrase called ‘the spirit of things’. When someone takes your work and gives it away as is perfectly reasonable under the GPL, you can throw a sort of moral accusation at them by pointing out that they are not partaking in the ‘spirit of things’. We recommend using the ‘spirit of things’ as many times as possible when fighting your GPL corner. It’s worked for us!”

I don’t see how you can say other people’s code can be given away for free or sold in one breath and then get upset if people give it away or sell it. Let’s face it, the GPL works for Brian and good luck to him – I too will become a Genesis customer. But he’s not particularly comfortable with it is he? Not based on what he said. An exercise in double-think, if ever there was one.

Having given away code for 10 years with nothing coming back, I’m just a little disenchanted with the notion of free anything at the moment. The cost of free is pretty high.

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