Without any prior announcement, WordPress.Org pulled 200 (well, 201 to be precise) themes from their Theme Library overnight on the 9th/10th of December 2008, suspending them.

The only information we got was:

Links to spectacu.la will no longer
be approved, as a result this theme
has been suspended.

That was it.  A lot of work to get the theme right, to conform to their standards, xhtml standards and every damn browser we could find and they pull it with no more than a one-line automated mailing.  I e-mailed but, as is usually the case with anything to do with Automattic, there was no response.  And of course there’s nothing on the blog either.  No surprise there then.

Prior to the pulling, 712 themes were available (see image above right), while now there are just 511 themes available (below right).

We’re Highly Miffed (to be quite English about it)

At first I was just irritated.  Then I guessed that they’d decided that a theme couldn’t link back to any commercial organisation - even if that commercial organisation is producing no-strings GPL code.  I’m not quite sure why WordPress.org has such an issue with commercialism - Automattic, who run WordPress, are a very commercial entity.  The $29.5m of funding behind them is hardly insignificant.  $29.5m is about 29,500,000 times more profit than we’ve made from Spectacu.la so far.  We don’t have the luxury of venture capital either, being funded entirely out of our own pockets.

The more I think about it, the more I realise that Automattic appear to want it every way - to have their own protected IP and commercial interests whilst keeping all others as far away as possible.  Anyone, commercial or otherwise, who contributes to a GPL project puts in a huge amount of time and effort on code that they could so easily lose control of and for which there’s definitely zero direct monetary reward.  With the Evening Sun theme we created we introduced an interesting approach to handling threaded comments that’s designed to prevent rambling threads, but allow nested conversations regardless.  That code’s GPL.  Anybody can use it.

And the reward for all the work that went into this?  The work that got it backward compatible, degrading safely if JS wasn’t available, and didn’t break in IE6?  Well it seems we can’t have it.  Or at least, not from WordPress.org anyway, even though that code, perhaps in modified form, could easily find itself all over the place.  All we wanted was a measly link, and we can’t have it.

Dangled Carrots

One of the reasons we created Spectacu.la was because last year Matt Mullenweg announced the idea of a Themes Marketplace.  This would allow themes developers to earn some money.  Well, 50% of the price of the theme anyway, with the remaining 50% going to Automattic.  But it’s expensive to set these things up… if it’s done commercially.

And we thought that it was a great idea - I dropped Mr Mullenweg a line, and we soon received instructions and a deadline.  We created a brand new theme (Grassland in fact) which was to be an exclusive - we couldn’t make it available anywhere else - and it had to be GPL so it fit in with WordPress.org for free download and rights.  Fair enough.  Prior to that we’d always coded for clients, it would be nice to give something back.

Our pricing for Grassland was pretty low, figuring that it wasn’t that ornate a theme, and didn’t have any special functionality.  I think we were aiming at around $20 per theme.

Soon enough we got confirmation that we would be launch partners for this club.  Yay!  Our code is good, and we made required modifications to fit in to Automattic’s standards.

Then it went silent.  A month passed.  I e-mailed.  And nothing.  A lot of prodding later and we were told there were delays.  These things happen and we had other things to do, so we waited some more.  Eventually in summer I contacted Lloyd Budd who was in charge of this element of the project, and… nothing.

That’s the problem.  It took two weeks to develop Grassland to the standards to which we and Automattic work.  We’re quicker these days, but even so… that’s quite a bit of work for someone to do for exactly $0.  And at that time the company as a whole was losing a lot of money.  We really needed some funds, and they never came.  Not even a few quid.  A theme download a week would have covered our broadband bills, for example.  We weren’t in financial trouble, but these are difficult times for a new company without venture capital.  But in the end forming Spectacu.la as a way to help raise some revenue from our intelectual property made clear sense.

Lack of Openness at Automattic?  Arrogance?

Yep - just doesn’t feel like a very open company.  You’ll struggle to find their address on their website (I couldn’t)  and they rarely give clear guidelines about what they do and do not accept in their own repositories.  Their arrogance comes from success, I suppose.  They must be busy people and have little time to worry about the concerns of us little folk.  And when something is changed… it just happens.  Theme and plugin developers are expected to respond quickly and positively, but obviously for no additional reward… it almost feels like the only ones they like to be rewarded for their hard work are those at… Automattic.

Start Showing Some Grace

We’ve provided other resources back to the community - our WP User Manual is free in PDF form, and I do my best to keep it up to date, in spite of the lack of financial reward.

So Spectacu.la and the people behind it put a huge amount of effort into the WP community and our reward for deciding to contribute a professional quality GPL theme with zero strings attached was a one line automated e-mail.

If Automattic continues to treat WordPress developers with such disdain, they can expect to start losing the support of the community.  They need to start treating us all a little better and not expecting that we can all make a decent, passable living from giving our stuff away.  This is even more important now there’s a worldwide recession - money simply isn’t easy to find any longer and debts are no longer tolerated so well by our bankers.  It’s down to brass tacks - we need to survive, and we need to find ways to get paid for what we do.  A bit of publicity from our not insignificant free stuff helps with that.

Linkage:  Received a great link from a webapart to a Gaping Void cartoon.  Is this what WordPress are trying to achieve?  http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/003360.html

Update - Matt Mullenweg has been in touch to say that mistakes may have been made.  It’s not clear how this tallies with the change in policy saying that themes link to sites that support premium themes aren’t allowed… however he does say that if we’re kosher with the GPL and the policy on our site doesn’t attempt to change that (and we always aim to be 100% straight, legal and fair) then it was most likely a mistake.  So in our case we believe that we should start seeing our themes on the repository again soon.  Good, because we’ve got a tasty re-jig of Grassland (called Grassland 2.0 funny enough) which has full WP2.7 loveliness

I need to also add that we’ve been told it’s bad form to conflate Automattic with WordPress.org - although they’re highly interlinked they should be considered separately.  However, given they’re both led by the same person, it’s natural that one will influence the other.