Wordpress sponsored themes controversy
As probably the most popular self-hosted blogging system ((I have a sneaking suspicion that, maybe, Typepad > Wordpress in terms of overall users – it seems helluva popular with corporate blogs)), Wordpress is now attracting the sorts of parasites that did more to kill P2P file sharing than the copyright cartels could ever have.
I’m talking, of course, about the adware peddlers. Such people create themes for Wordpress (of varying quality), and then use licensing restrictions to force the users of those themes to carry free adverts for sites of the theme author’s choice. Matt Mullenweg (in a post on the Weblog Tools Collection) suggests that this might actually be illegal:
Finally many of these themes try to legally disallow you from removing the advertising link by claiming it’s part of the Creative Commons attribution to leave it. This is almost funny, because these themes are on shaky legal ground themselves. WordPress is Free, meaning you’re free to do pretty much anything you like with it. It’s under a license that encourages user freedom called the GPL, which says if you distribute something that links internal functions and data structures of a GPL program (like themes do with WordPress) that also needs to be Free. At best, theme authors claiming you can’t remove the link are ignoring or ignorant of the license issues, at worst they’re actively exploiting (…) WordPress. ((Weblog Tools Collection – On Sponsored Themes))
I’m not convinced by that argument – proprietary Wordpress modules have been about for ages (most prominent among them Spam Karma 2, which is frequently promoted on the Wordpress Codex), and other GPL applications are distributed with proprietary modules without any legal issues at all ((Proprietary Linux graphics, wifi drivers ring a bell Matt?)).
Legal or not, adware themes are definitely not something that anyone associated with Wordpress – whether as a developer or a user – should want if they value the credibility of the project. I’m glad that Matt has come out heavily against these parasites ((They prey off the work of the Wordpress developers, and the PageRank of blog authors, so ‘parasites’ is a descriptive rather than a purely abusive term)) and that the Wordpress community more generally seems to be against adware themes.