The valuable element here is the WordPress trademark. Automattic, with wordpress.com, is trading on the brand equity of the trademark, which now is owned by the WordPress Foundation. How the Foundation licenses and protects this trademark will be the bellwether of the intentions of its director(s). It costs real money to protect and license a trademark. Check out http://wordpressplugins.com for instance. I would be surprised to learn that the trademark was licensed for this use, though of course that is possible. Will the Foundation license the trademark in a way that benefits the community? Time will tell!

I’m not against selling themes and plugins at all.
I am certainly not a code of love “taliban”, rest assured.

Some people are doing a great job. WooThemes is a perfect example, and there are many more in the same vein, like Justin Tadlock’s Theme Hybrid, for instance.

Plugins for sale are the new trend, I just question the way it is sometimes done and above all how Automattic is accused of being the sole beneficiary of the community’s efforts.

In that respect, Daniel’s comment triggered my spontaneous reply.

I had just been chatting with developers who wanted to discuss the possibility to start a wpplugins.com competitor and it felt like talking to gold diggers, as their words were fairly aggressive against Automattic.
Hence the somewhat passionate tone.

Your answer does offer a more balanced view of things.

Whether it is possible to create a WordPress theme or plugin that is not a derivative work of WordPress has been hotly debated – see http://www.webmaster-source.com/2009/01/29/why-theyre-wrong-wordpress-plugins-shouldnt-have-to-be-gpl/ for a typical thread. The answer to that question really can only be determined on a case-by-case basis, and such a case would require a copyright owner of some piece of WordPress (the copyright isn’t owned by a single entity) to file a civil suit alleging a violation of the license, against some plugin or theme author. All of that costs a lot of money. The WordPress Foundation is not one of those copyright holders and could not itself file such a suit. It could, however, pay for someone to do so. But really, do you think they would? What impact would such an attempt to strictly enforce the GPL have on the WordPress platform?

Why are you against developers making money from plugins or themes? In my experience, software ecosystems in which everyone gets to eat are the most successful. There is a persistent myth that FOSS communities are all about volunteers working for the love of code, and that such projects fail when their communities consist of self-interested developers. The reality though is that successful FOSS communities make it possible for people to make money, while not trampling on others’ rights to the commons. WordPress is just such a community, and that is the goose that lays those golden eggs.

Just today I bought a WordPress theme from WooThemes (http://www.woothemes.com) which is GPLed. I could have found a copy of it on the Internet somewhere, and according to the GPL license, it is legal for someone who has downloaded the code legally from WooThemes to distribute a verbatim copy of the theme’s code (but not the CSS or images). But I chose to pay WooThemes for the excellent support and frequent, high-value updates they provide to their paying customers. That is the model I think makes sense – deliver value, and charge a reasonable price for it, while abiding by the terms of the WordPress license.

Thanks again for your comment!

The way I see it, nobody questioned the WordPress GPL vision only 2 years ago.

Now that WordPress’ ecosystem has reached critical mass, adding value to projects like WPMU with BuddyPress – and there’s a neat market for it now, but only now – some people claim a slice of the pie. That’s OK, Automattic never said it was forbidden. You just can’t do what you want, there are rules, thank God.

By the same token it’s easy to criticize the GPL. It certainly doesn’t facilitate making money. But hey! Would WordPress have grown that big without it? It’s a bit easy to say “we want change” now. It is certainly more difficult to play by the GPL rules and the temptation is great.

If the news spread that gold was to be found in large quantities in the YellowStone Park, surely quite a few people would like its status to be changed to allow private mining. (Some people are actually trying.)

Not so cool, or would it be?

I feel that’s the situation WordPress finds itself in right now.
It’s always easy to criticize a leader. Matt is a leader, and a pretty good one. The pressure will keep raising in the years to come.

Selling plugins is a bit like going for the easy gold. I mean, sure, it takes time to develop proper plugins for an ever richer framework such as WordPress, and time is money.
I suggest developing plugins for clients then giving back the code to the community is a proper way to do it.
Developing plugins for the sake of selling them directly isn’t.
My intuition is that it might kill the goose with the golden eggs.

Lumberjacks in the Amazonian forest have good reasons too. Felling trees is easy, you make fast money. Growing them, on the other hand, takes time and requires a special kind of spirit: you have to think about the future of the whole ecosystem, not just about one’s private interests.

I’m only too happy to see that the WordPress community “authorities” aren’t as powerless as the environmental organizations.
Are they hypocritical?
They don’t sell plugins, nor do they sell themes, right? They do sell services, on the other hand.
Which is way tougher.

The WordPress Foundation won’t make everyone happy.
But it is definitely there for the preservation of the community’s future interests.