ergophobe - 6:09 pm on Jul 22, 2010 (gmt 0)

SK

Bad analogy. GPL doesn't mean public domain and it doesn't forcibly imply free as in beer, only free as in speech.

Better analogy. Since the state licenses you as a driver and since they (meaning we of course) own the roads, they can dictate how you use those roads. The Thesis position is more like telling the state trooper who pulled you over "Well, I understand that a driver's license requires me to observe certain rules of the road, but since I don't believe the state has a legal right to require me to have a license, I choose to ignore those traffic laws."

End of story

Not according to the FSF lawyers. Their position is that if an app won't run without the other app, it's covered under the GPL.

So yes, some apps interface with WP through public standards like RSS. Those apps are not required to be GPL. But a plugin doesn't run without WP and therefore must be GPL. End of story.

Question: can I hotlink to your site and show your images on my site? Why not? I'm not actually distributing your site, I'm just "hooking" into it.

Didn't Matt remove any theme that had the a "sponsored by" section

After tons of complaining from the community, yes.

Matt, Wordpress isn't yours

Actually, Matt agrees with that. Wordpress belongs to the Wordpress copyright holders [codex.wordpress.org], of which Matt is one.

Curiously absent from that list, by the way, is Chris Pearson who describes himself as one of the three most important people in the history of Wordpress.

Matt tends to be the highest profile spokesman for the core WP community, but the core developers agree with him such as...

- Dougal Campbell, who is the third "most important person" (before or after Pearson) agrees with Matt [dougal.gunters.org].
- Ryan Boren agress too [ryan.boren.me].
- And so does Mark Jaquith [markjaquith.wordpress.com]
- And Donncha O Caoimh is at least a big fan of the GPL [shankerbakshi.com].

Also, this is in keeping with other GPL'd CMS.
Drupal

7: If I write a module or theme, do I have to license it under the GPL? Yes. Drupal modules and themes are a derivative work of Drupal.

src:http://drupal.org/licensing/faq/

Joomla

Can I release an extension under a non-GPL licence? It is our opinion that most extensions are derivative works of Joomla! and must be licensed under the GNU GPL…. How does the treatment of templates differ from the treatment of components, modules, and plugins? In our opinion, templates are composite packages that consist of both code elements and non-code elements. We believe that the code elements of a template must be licensed under the GNU GPL because they are derivative works. However, the non-code elements are just data acted upon by the software and may be licensed in any way the author sees fit. The non-code elements include elements like Images, Movies, Animations, CSS and formatting markup.

src: [opensourcematters.org...]

In the Linux world it is generally considered that programs running on Linux don't need to be GPL, but LKMs do.

The whole reason Apache doesn't use the GPL is to avoid this.
This is the very issue that causes Apache to have their own license:

We avoid GPLv3 software because merely linking to it is considered by the GPLv3 authors to create a derivative work.

src: [apache.org...]