My work comes mainly through people seeing the work I have done, contacting me and asking for something similar. I get paid for the hours I spend developing a custom solution, rather than reselling the same themes.

What I am concerned about is that the GPL makes it legal for people to represent my work as their own (of course, they can’t legally do so with the CSS, unless I explicitly release that as GPL too – though if I do not I can forget about exposure through WP itself).

I’ll lose business because of this, and it sucks that I have no way to protect myself here – that in fact I have less of a way to protect myself than before.

I think community-driven, incremental development is a Good Thing. What I lament is that there is no way to defend against those who would seek to represent my work as their own, and effectively steal clients from me.

Of course, they could always do this before – it is trivial to edit a text file, after all. What sucks, to me, is that under the GPL this misrepresentation is legal. That doesn’t sound right to me.

You will find listed there a company called Instinct which produces the wp-commerce plugin which is most certainly not 100% GPL.

So lets see if we have this straight Matt: Themes must be GPL because they use code found within WordPress, but plugins do not EVEN though they too use code found within WordPress…???

Not only that but you will actively recommend them!!?? (Yes I know there is a disclaimer on the list saying its not a recommendation, but thats just semantics. In practice it IS a recommendation.)

Anyone else bothered by this blatant double standard?

Quite honestly I’m not going to play your game anymore – I tried discussing this on the phone with you, and it’s obvious you’re trying to prove something.

Be clear when you try to represent my point of view. As I’ve discussed many times, I know what the license allows and doesn’t. And I’m PERFECTLY entitled to say that people who take my themes, which I’ve worked 1000’s of hours on, and put it on a site and use MY BRAND to market themselves only to undercut me and misrepresent me to make a few bucks.

That doesn’t mean I want a different license, just saying that it sucks people have to work that way. And because you (or anyone else for that matter) isn’t having this happen to them, it’s very hard for me to believe that you’d be perfectly happy knowing that people are blatantly being unethical and taking money out of your pocket. (or as you call it, preventing money from going in.)

I’m all for redistribution and using my code to make a better product. I’ve never said otherwise, but do me a favor and stop running around and taking shots at us. It’s sad, really.