This post is more about the GPL than WordPress, but here is my 2¢: Matt may be right in his understanding of the GPL. He is legally right to enforce it. That doesn’t mean I agree with the original choice to use the GPL or his choice to enforce it.

Here is my open-source philosophy: “I share code and contribute because I love it. I get joy from people using my code. If you can make money off my code, awesome!*”

Is it naive to think others should feel this same way about the code they release?

Up until now, any code I have released is dual licensed under MIT/GPL following the lead of jQuery. I don’t think I will change this practice, but I might put a disclaimer in that GPL is included only so it doesn’t limit those who have to use it and the MIT is my preferred license.

I fundamentally stand against a few philosophies of the GPL, but the most glaring to me are these (completely paraphrasing): “You can sell this software, but it must remain free.” and “Why don’t you sell support for your free product!”

Lets take them one at a time:

“You can sell free software” This one is great from a business perspective. Work really really hard to build something, then sell it…. once. The guy that buys it, uploads it and distributes it for free. Ok, now forget the business perspective: I would lose sleep at night selling people something they can easily get for free. There are lots of things in this world people would rather pay for than do themselves, but free software is pretty straight forward. Buying a theme is just as easy as downloading it somewhere else for free. I would feel like a complete cheat to sell free software, even if I called it a “distribution charge.”

“Give the product away, but sell support.” Ok, again, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The work effort of selling 1 digital product or 100,000 digital products is not a lot different in this day and age. However, providing paid support to 1 person or 100,000 people takes a drastically different amount of time. Furthermore, anyone could technically provide support for your product. So you take all the time to build a product, release it, then compete to make money off it. 

Paid Support models obviously work (for broadly accepted technologies) and whole industries can be built off them. My point is this: for a small time person building a product to sell, I think they will do far better in hard cash and time spent from a product sale than supporting that same product as the only source of income from it. 

* To those who follow my Twitter stream closely, you will remember when I tweeted that I had no problem with paid WP themes, but I did with paid jQuery plugins. Obviously that is hypocritical of me. I like everything jQuery to be free I guess… haha. If you sell jQuery plugins, GO FOR IT! Thats why the MIT license is so great.