Re: Fuzzy machine learning framework v1.2

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

"Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> writes:

> Le Sat, 02 Jun 2012 15:59:43 +0200, darkestkhan
> <darkestkhan@gmail.com> a écrit:
>
>> On Saturday, June 2, 2012 10:25:56 AM UTC, Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)
>> wrote:
>>> Le Sat, 02 Jun 2012 10:06:23 +0200, Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> a
>>> écrit:
>>> > Is there evidence for "the doubt about the GPL is increasing"?
>>>
>>> Well, “increasing” may be misleading as it does not explicitly
>>> express an amount by which. I should have said “visibly increasing”
>>> (enough to be visible). I have a web connection at home since about
>>> 2005, and at that time, there was near to no visible opposition to
>>> the GPL which was glorified every where. Questioning seems more
>>> frequent to me since some time (two or three years?). Some big
>>> enough examples I have in mind, is an affair with WordPress themes
>>> designers [?], who suddenly was [?]  forced to release their works
>>> under the GPL, after multiple years selling their works under
>>> another license (someone lately noticed a trick implying they now
>>> had to release their work under GPL). This case made some noise, as
>>> this themes author made a living from it.
>>
>> So? He broke license in the first place so he should be publishing
>> his work under GPL.
>
> Designing themes, is graphic designer work. Prior to that case, I've
> heard of skinning or theming contaminated by the license of the
> application it applies to. That an example of how tricky the GPL
> is. If my mind is right, because the themes was attached via PHP hook,
> then this was considered to be linking, and thus considered to be
> GPLed. There were not programmer, but graphic designer, their did not
> released programs, but styles, nevertheless, the GPL applied, late, as
> a bad surprise (and that's not the only bad trick of the GPL
> contaminating effect, will give another potential issue later in this
> post). You can release a picture created with GIMP with under license
> you want, but you cannot release a WordPress theme, under any license
> you want.

Well, I chased this round and I have to say I'm surprised.

WordPress claim (eg [1]) that the fact that themes (the PHP part) are
executed in the same way as WordPress's own themes and call up the same
Wordpress libraries makes them derivatives and hence subject to
the GPL.

The Software Freedom Law Center[2] says, quoted in [3],

   The PHP elements, taken together, are clearly derivative of WordPress
   code. The template is loaded via the include() function. Its contents
   are combined with the WordPress code in memory to be processed by PHP
   along with (and completely indistinguishable from) the rest of
   WordPress. The PHP code consists largely of calls to WordPress
   functions and sparse, minimal logic to control which WordPress
   functions are accessed and how many times they will be called. They
   are derivative of WordPress because every part of them is determined
   by the content of the WordPress functions they call. As works of
   authorship, they are designed only to be combined with WordPress into
   a larger work.

This strikes me as extremely contentious, and at first I wasn't willing
to believe it.

However, further research shows that a WordPress theme is an example of
plug-in use as discussed in the GPL FAQ [4]:

   If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function
   calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a
   single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the
   main program and the plug-ins. This means the plug-ins must be
   released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license, and
   that the terms of the GPL must be followed when those plug-ins are
   distributed.

I must say that this statement is a lot clearer than the Software
Freedom Law Center's. You might well be able to test its applicability
in a court, since it's not part of the License, isn't even called up
by it, and is admittedly only a statement of the FSF's belief.

[1] http://goo.gl/c0tWG
[2] http://www.softwarefreedom.org/
[3] http://wordpress.org/news/2009/07/themes-are-gpl-too/
[4] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins