I understand the whole license thing, but I also understand that I have spent $7000.00 to take a course on how to create websites, templates, and premium templates using css etc..

I don’t understand why people think that what some people have chosen for a career should be given away for free. Chris wallace as an example.. I have used some of his free child themes, and have recommended his “premium” or pro themes to others. His themes are great looking and must have taken a while to design. When looking at the themes you realize that he is at the very least knowledgeable when it comes to design. Shouldn’t he be compensated for the number of hours he spent designing the theme, or giving out support. Keeping in mind that he does offer free themes at the same time which are still helping the community. I don’t see why he can’t charge for a higher quality of service. Just like Wordpress.com charges for a better quality of service. Yes they give some of their service away for free. But for ha higher quality more functioning service it costs some money.

GPL is not about money, its about contributing and making something available to all people.

1. Dual licensing. License the design separately from the theme code. The CSS has nothing to do with the PHP functions used in your template files, same with images. Those can carry completely separate licenses, even if they are packaged together.

2. Ignore WordPress’ license. Place your themes under whatever license you want. No one is going to come after you. People will still do whatever they want with your themes, if they’re good enough.

3. Build child themes. The argument here is that if done properly, child themes can completely avoid hooking into WordPress code and thus can be licensed completely separately (since they would technically be just CSS/images/Javascript). Pick your framework, Thematic, Thesis, Hybrid, whatever. Go nuts.

4. Make themes for Joomla. Yuck.

There are many possible answers and solutions to this (protecting your work and making a profit on GPL) but most of them lead to my previous statement. You need to make a name for yourself in order to make a profit.

I will explore some of these options in a future post, because there are many people whose daily food depends on them.

If you don’t like the terms, don’t develop for WordPress. It’s that simple.

I really don’t understand how this is such a big controversy.

Sometimes, many are left with the impression that after the business has succeeded it’s easy to follow the GPL train. That’s were the tension comes from. I just hope that (since all this starts with them) WordPress will come up with a model to help and encourage both sides, and why not, also make a profit out of it.

and perhaps the “tension” is what makes it so meaningful, at the end of the day…