Support and General Use > Theming and Appearance Customization

Theme Licensing

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lights0ut:
Scorche brought up this topic on IRC, and I thought that I'd ask everyone what they thought about it. As things are right now, many themes do not state their license , if you've heard of the Soap Seal of Approval, it has a rule about stating the theme's license. The SOAP is a topic for DevCon West, so it, or a modified version, or some other approval method will be discussed, and hopefully adopted.

Scorche pointed out that if a theme doesn't have a license, users do not have permission to edit the theme and redistribute it, even bug fixes. You can always ask permission, but many themes that do not have a license also do not have a way to contact the author or the author is no longer around.
Something needs to be decided in order to implement an approval system so I thought I'd start some discussion on it.


(I know this is being discussed at DevCon-West anyway, and ultimately what is decided there may make this all irrelevant)

Llorean:
My personal opinion is that we should take down all themes without an explicitly stated license, then post that you have to explicitly state a license for your theme when posting them.

PaulJam:

--- Quote from: Llorean on May 20, 2007, 01:07:24 AM ---My personal opinion is that we should take down all themes without an explicitly stated license, then post that you have to explicitly state a license for your theme when posting them.

--- End quote ---
In this case it maybe would be nice if someone could post an appropriate license on the WPS Uplad Guide on the WpaGallery wiki. Because i guess many people don't have a clue about this licensing stuff, so it would be nice to have a default one which allows redistributing, modifying etc.

Llorean:
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License is probably a very good place to start.

But the key isn't that they have to post it with a license that allows redistribution, or modification. The key is that we want them to explicitly state what is allowed, so that people also know what isn't allowed.

At the moment, even doing something as simple as fixing bad date tags violates US copyright law, if one wants to be exceedingly technical.

AlexP:

--- Quote from: Llorean on May 20, 2007, 02:28:12 AM ---At the moment, even doing something as simple as fixing bad date tags violates US copyright law, if one wants to be exceedingly technical.

--- End quote ---

What about Swedish law, as given that is where the servers are located (and furthermore many of us are outside the US) it would seem more relevant than US law other than for US users.

I take the point that releasing with a licence would solve all these problems, but am just wondering about 'saving' older themes that were released without.

Of course, it is much easier just to have a clean break and not have to worry at all.

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