It is important to pay attention to licenses and terms even when the words “GPL,” “Open Source” and/or “Free” are used to describe a work. The GPL License is the standard for free and open source software.

There is GPL and then there is GPL-with-a-catch.

If you are building your own web site, this can matter. For example it is quite common for web site themes to be released under GPL.

It is also quite common to restrict the application of the GPL license to the php or java script coding and to attach different licensing to the css and images that compose the full theme.

In many cases the conditions are very reasonable.  Releasing ccs and images under the Creative Commons License (CCL)  is frequently a matter of an author wanting to receive acknowledgment for his or her work.  The CCL allows authors to specify how they want that acknowledgment to be made.Most commonly GPL themes merely require a notation in the footer of the theme that links back to the author’s own home page. That is hardly a severe restriction.

Increasingly however other kinds of restrictions have been creeping into the thriving “free theme” business. The most unacceptable are those authors who insert a bunch of links to third-rate spam sites and insist that those links be maintained as part of the CCL “acknowledgment.” Other authors have resorted to encrypting the footer which leaves the user in the position of deleting it entirely and feeling like a thief or taking on faith that whatever is going on in the encryption can be trusted.

The two main requirements of CCL terms are acknowledgment and, often, non-commercial use. Non-commercial use can be tricky because different authors have different definitions of what is “commercial use.”

Where this becomes truly problematic is when you obtain a theme, not for free, but by paying one of the many theme subscription sites. Despite paying a fee, many of these sites impose a non-commercial use restriction on their subscribers. That may be reasonable when the fee paid is $19 – $20 when having the same theme created from scratch could easily cost $500 – $1,000.

The difference of course is the same as the difference between an original oil paint for which you might pay $600 and a print which sells for $30. In one case you are purchasing something unique that will only be presented as your own property. In the second case you are buying the right to use a copy of something that any number of other people may also be using on their own walls or web sites. At least with fine art prints you know how many are in distribution. If it’s not a numbered print then it’s a poster. (and if it’s one of 25,000 it’s not worth any more than a poster)

Most distressing is the burden that can be placed on truly small operations. When one’s “commercial use” is one’s own site, perhaps promoting skills as a musician, the attention paid to the details of licensing schemes is no more than that paid by someone who just wants a vanity site.

We think it not unreasonable to expect genuine commercial sites to pay individual subscription fees. So, if we build a site for a client using a theme from Elegant, we would expect the client to kick in the $20 for an independent fee payment to Elegant. If we build a site for a client using GPL-CCL then we would leave in the acknowledgment. We in fact insert acknowledgments when they are not required in the case of fully GPL themes because we want the creators to get their recognition. But if Elegant or another subscription site wanted to charge the client several hundred dollars, we would simply put one of our own coders to work to ensure that a truly unique theme that is the sole property of the client is returned for the investment.

We like GPL and even CCL themes because they prevent continually reinventing the wheel.  We can put in time customizing and refining rather than building from scratch and that is good for everyone. But we will never tolerate a situation where a client is not completely certain of their own rights and obligations and we will never allow a client to pay full original-work fees for unrestricted-distribution copies.