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.
Hi Dave, read your post and I’m slightly confused ~ perhaps you could clarify?
Wordpress pulled 201 themes from their library,…
a)How many of these were yours?
b)How will this affect your business/website?
Best regards
James.
Wow, they sure did pull 200 themes. I’ve only added one theme to the repository as of this point to see how things go. I just checked to make sure it’s still up there, and it is. My theme is tied to a commercial organization as well.
Maybe someone has an explanation. This is the first I’ve heard of this.
@James - Only one of the themes was ours. It’s not really that critical for us, and the theme had only been there a few days before the mass pull so we never got to find out whether it was useful for us or not.
@Justin - Great to see you drop by! I suspect that the difference is that the theme of yours that’s up there links to justintadlock.com rather than themehybrid.com. The problem for us is that James and I work as a team and have always preferred to work collectively rather than individually. At the end of the day, we’re not rockstar frontmen who want much individual attention (sorry Adii ;o) and it would be unfair on either of us if we did a lot through our individual sites.
No explanation or acknowledgement yet to my e-mail to the WP team. Not that I expected one.
LOL @ Dave for that last comment…
Luckily my ego can take a bit of bruising and I’m not fussed about any kind of rockstardom any more.
That said, I got a shocking e-mail from one of our affiliates (of WooThemes) this morning saying that his themes had been cut from the repository because he was promoting our themes. I’ve also e-mailed Matt about this and we’ll wait to see how he responds. So I’ll reserve opinion & judgement at this stage…
All I would like to point out however, is that even though WordPress is open-source, there is nothing open-source about the way Matt & co makes their decisions. I suspect that these kind of decisions will eventually just open a can of worms…
All my themes have been suspended because I linked to WooThemes. I had one of the 15 top featured themes with 500+ downloads per day, 40000+ overall downloads - now I have … nothin’
The day before yesterday there was no warning, no information or any hint that ads for premium themes would not be allowed on authors sites. Yesterday they edited the theme requirements, after they deleted all these themes.
I feel beated like a dog by WordPress - for nothing. Which country does WordPress come from?
[...] more here: WordPress.org Pull 200 Themes from the Library | Spectacu.la … This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 and is filed under Wordpress Themes. You [...]
@Mark - sorry to hear your bad news. It’s not a good situation at all. You didn’t post a link so can I ask which themes do you have out there that were pulled?
I think it’s a real shame - your theme sounds like it was popular, and for that to be the case it must have been great on so many levels. Our theme had only been up a few days so only had a handful of downloads.
Given the already stringent code requirements and additional work required to get onto the Theme Library it really feels like a kick in the teeth.
To answer your question - WP is owned by Automattic which is a US company. If they were UK based they might fall foul of anti-competitive laws. Perhaps in the US too, but I don’t know for sure and I’m thinking about taking this to the appropriate bodies here - if only to make a point.
I think would have gone over a lot better if they would have communicated better. A shame. I really like Automattic–maybe they are understaffed.
I have three themes in the theme directory, and they are both still there. One of them, “crafty”, is actually the theme in your screen shot (thanks).
All of my themes refer to portfolio which is wholly a commerical site, but I do not sell premium themes. Maybe Auto is mad that companies like Themeforest are making cash off of their blood & tears.
I’m wondering why they don’t launch a premium theme site like is explained in Matt’s post.
Anyway, thanks for the heads up!
Those sneaky bastards.
This conversation is really important but really going nowhere without something official from Matt and Automattic.
Hello? Ring ring.
(That’s the phone, Automattic!)
-Alister
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Here’s what Matt has to say:
Thanks for emailing me about the theme directory. The other day I noticed a ton of bad stuff had snuck in like lots of spammy SEO links, themes whose sites said you couldn’t modify them (which is a violation of the GPL), etc. Exactly the sort of stuff the theme directory was meant to avoid.
There were also a few that violated WP community guidelines, like the domain policy. So since Monday we’ve been clearing stuff out en mass. If you’re kosher with the GPL and don’t claim or promote otherwise on your site and your theme was removed, it was probably a mistake. Give us a week to catch up with the bad stuff and then drop a note.
Thanks guys, and let me know if you have any more questions.
–
Matt Mullenweg
http://ma.tt | http://automattic.com
It’s sad, so sad.
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this pretty lame, I sell nothing off my theme site and don’t even have any advertisements, adsense, or anything on it
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They’re now advertising for Revolution at the repository. Many authors have been fired for that.
Oh really? Well that’s interesting.
Of course, Revolution is GPL, even if you might need plenty of help in getting it working right
You do have to wonder what was talked about in that meeting between Brian Gardner and Matt Mullenweg they had a while back. I did wonder why Mr Gardner felt the need to go and have a meeting about the subject. Of course, the meeting could have just been “hey guys, I’m gonna go GPL! Let’s have a beer to celeberate!” But to some it may look like something else….
Thinking on - it’s marked as Paid Themes. So is this advertising spot open to all of us who sell paid themes? How much does it cost?
Dave, just reposting this comment here, so your readers can see:
My decision to go open source was completely independent of anything dealing with WP/Automattic. Our trip to SF to meet with Matt & Toni was to share our business model, and to ensure that it complied to the open source/GPL license standards.
David, I don’t see hypocrisy in it for this reason - Revolution complies to the standards that WordPress is built on. If any other theme designers decided to make their themes in compliance as well, then they would have an equal chance at being listed there as well. There is nothing exclusive about our banner on that page.
That being said, it may appear exclusive, mainly because in my opinion, anyone selling a premium theme will unlikely chose like I did to go open source/GPL. Why, because their business is probably doing well, as was the original Revolution model. But, I took a HUGE risk by going open source, and I don’t forsee many others (if any) will be willing to take that risk.
Mark, the one difference is that Revolution is an open source/gpl licensed theme, and not premium themes that the elimination of free themes occurred because of. Your comment isn’t an apples to apples comparison.
Hi Brian - it’s great of you to drop by here. Have always respected your strong graphic sense. It’s only mildly annoying when clients go “ooh, can you make our site look like this?” and then point at one of your themes
But back to the point. We’re trying to run businesses here. You’re in a comfortable situation, perhaps, that if your business fails to make money from its new model you have other things to fall back on. Some of us aren’t necessarily so comfortable. While I won’t starve if Spectacu.la fails, I’ll quite possibly have to bring to an end the development of *any* GPL themes here. And if that doesn’t work in the WordPress market then perhaps we need to look at other markets?
LOL, Dave, funny you say that - Chris Pearson yelled at me for the same thing re: Revolution. If you are looking for more ways to make money, I’d be happy to talk to you about that. I get a TON of custom theme requests, and would be happy to send some of that your way if you want to get in touch with me about that.
The Drupal community has debated this GPL/Premium/Theme issue for a while. And a solid understanding has come from it:
A theme is made up of several files - template files (ending in .php), CSS, images and JavaScript. The template files are considered a part of Drupal, which is licensed under the GPL, which means they are not restricted in their redistribution. You are free to share the .php documentation and blog so others can benefit from them. However, the rest of the theme - images, CSS and JavaScript - is independent from Drupal and owned by us and licensed by you for one website per purchase. You may not publish or share these parts of the themes with anyone else. Please review our EULA for full details. (Taken from a Drupal Theme Developers page)
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I can see where they are coming from. The Theme Library was getting a little out of hand. There were some obvious violations to the GPL and the WordPress.org policy.
At least they have introduced the new “Commercial Themes” area for larger theme-building organisations such as Woo and Revolution to get into the library.
Interesting how quickly things are changing on that page - it said Paid Themes last time I looked and now they’re “commercially supported GPL themes.”
You can only go there if you use GPL with all your themes, not just a majority like Spectacu.la
Unfortunately, the shifting sands of WordPress are quite possibly not the best place to try to build a business on and we’re looking closely at where are and where we’re going with this.
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If they apply these requirements to plugins… will we lose wp e-commerce, akismet, wp db-backup, every single one of Yoast’s plugins (Sociable, Breadcrumbs, Google Analytics, etc)… and I could go on.
All these are on the first page of the popular plugin list. They also all have a “premium” version being sold on their personal website or an affiliate link to a premium theme store. These two criteria were enough to remove themes from the repository. Why not plugins? Is it because they don’t want to lose some of these plugins? Or is Automattic just trying to kill the premium theme business and doesn’t really care about GPL?
WP-DB-Backup does not have a “premium” version, nor do I link to any premium themes. Please stop leaving this incorrect information on every blog discussing this issue.
[...] 200 GPL Themes removed from Wordpress.org Extend Area. Read some of the reports about it. Unless Matt himself clears the controversies officially, it seems to be the beginning of a never ending debate. [...]
Austin,
My bad, I actually thought I was looking at a different website. I didn’t mean to lump you in with the list that I was trying to quickly compile. My apology.
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I cannot and will not understand, why WordPress is not opening up a marketplace for addons (Themes,Plugins).
Have a look here: there is GPL PrestaShop but also now the PrestaStore - http://www.prestastore.com/ marketplace for addons. This will help the Presta lead developers to have some more funding for future improvments of the core system.
Why can’t WordPress do the same?
They could charge a 50% commission, most developers would still list things in such a marketplace. Or what about an official (paid) certification for WordPress premium themes?
I’m probably the least knowledgeable about this particular biz but I have been in business my entire life. Any business can refuse to service any customer for any reason it feels like. That’s just a fact of life. As long as you are not denying service on race color or creed then you have that right.
On our chat community in the terms it says we can refuse you service if we feel you don’t have any socially redeeming quality’s or we just don’t like you. We rarely use it but I have.
Coming from a lifetime of business experience and some knowledge of the legal implications in the U.S. it sounds like these people can do what they like and owe you nothing. There is no free speech on a website or the guarantee to distribute your work unless it is specifically written out. I don’t think they would be that stupid so if you worked a day,week,month,lifetime on what you thought was the greatest thing they can delete the whole library without owing you an explanation,comment or acknowledgment.
So unless someone out there has a contract from one of these company’s saying your theme gets in and we (cross our fingers) will keep it up because we like you than “Welcome to the real world”. Any biz entity profit or not will do what is best for them. End of story and that will be that.