Envato’s ThemeForest marketplace will now be licensing the PHP portions of their WordPress themes under the GPL.
To better respect the spirit of WordPress, beginning August 4th, all WP templates on ThemeForest will be sold with two licenses.
The first is the GPL, in which “All PHP code containing WordPress functionality” will fall under. The second is the standard ThemeForest license, which will protect all of the images, CSS and JavaScript.
This means customers will essentially have the same experience. You can pay for a theme for a one-site license, a 10-site, etc. However, if you got it into your head to strip all of the images, JavaScript and CSS, you could use the empty PHP and HTML shell on as many sites as you pleased; you could even redistribute it if you wanted.
Few people will probably want to do that, so for most intents and purposes, everything is as it was before, except Matt Mullenweg and company are happy.
This does put developers at a disadvantage though, as seems to be typical with the GPL. Designers have it easy with their freedom over the license over the visual aspect of their work, while developers have to license their PHP-intensive work under the GPL. This just means that developers of themes and plugins that have extensive backends should probably seek a business model other than simple retail, such as something more support-oriented, or simply not worry about the possibility of someone redistributing their code. So long as you receive the attribution due, and the redistributor made some changes to the work, is it really as big of a deal as it is made out to be?
