I could only find a slight error towards the end as you spoke about distribution. You do not need a mass to have distribution, it’s enough if there are two people.

So if I write you as my customer a theme, I must provide that one compatible to the GPL otherwise you could not use it (legally). In reality most customers do not care but I think it’s worth the education what free software is for those.

The only exception to that is the case that I provide the theme to myself, then I can have it under a totally proprietary license in conjunction with a GPL licensed wordpress.

Anyway, I created 2 WordPress tshirts (see the design in my blog). If you come to Indonesia again for WordCamp Indonesia 2010, one of this tshirt will be yours. Hahaha..
Because I don’t know where to send via post to your house in US.

I know at one point, you said you were sticking with GPL v2 and not going to GPL v3. Is that still true? Why that choice and do you think it will ever change? Or, is it not “correct” legally or morally, to change which version of the GPL WordPress is on because of which one it started on?

I know this video is entitled WordPress & GPL but for me it’s a business video. I think it is also important that people learn to live without a fear of loss.

Polldaddy, IntenseDebate, and After the Deadline are all candidates for being released under an Open Source license in the future, so keep an eye out there. We have released a number of infrastructure projects in preparation for that here:

http://code.trac.wordpress.org/

What about Gravatar and Intense Debate, though? Don’t these merely lock people into a proprietary platform provided by Automattic, especially since the former is now integrated by default into GPL-licensed WordPress? Or is there some value provided to everyone by their not being GPL-licensed?

In other words, it is common practice for theme developers to sell a single domain lic and then also an unlimited “developer” license at a higher price. It sounds like the single domain license would be against the GPL?

Also the most interesting part of Akismet isn’t necessarily the code, it’s the data, billions of comments over 4 years that it has seen now. That couldn’t be shared regardless because of privacy reasons. In the practical case of someone running their own Akismet server, the API itself is so simple that it’s not hard to implement, as Six Apart found when they cloned the API call-for-call for their Typepad Anti-spam service, which they claim is open source (I think they just made a API wrapper for the Dspam email project). Finally, of course, the plugin is fully GPL and they used that to their degree by just replacing the hostname in the plugin and releasing their own version of it under their own name, the rest being identical line for line. That surprised me, but it’s totally within their rights under the GPL.

In theory we could also open source the Akismet server API wrapper and keep all the good bits secret, but that would be mostly for PR only, I don’t think it would be that useful to people as the API itself is really easy to implement and there already is a OS implementation in 6A’s code.

Shouldn’t the community go further and insist that the authors of such themes release at least the PHP of their themes (as you mentioned earlier) under the GPL? They could still continue charging for their customisation services, artwork, access to the surrounding community etc.

I’m not meaning to be rude, I really would like to know. You seem very enthused about the benefits of freedom and open-source-ness, and I’d like to know why the disconnect. Are there situations where the GPL is not the best way to go?