While the GPL is pretty clear about this, and my personal moral code is as well, the topic today is not about the question of is it right to resell someone else’s work, but what do you do when someone’s reselling yours?
This happened to my friend not too long ago. Someone else took her theme and was reselling it and you either already know who it is or you don’t, it doesn’t matter for the sake of this story. Now, the issue was not if they could resell it, we all agreed they could. The issue was how they resold it. That is, they took her images, much of her ad copy, and resold it, presenting it as if it was their own code. And that was, we all agreed, wrong. That’s fraud, in my eyes. You’re taking someone else’s work and claiming ownership of it. But. That wasn’t my fight, it was my friend’s, and all I could offer was some moral support and connections.
But when this happens to you, what do you do?
First, don’t type angry. It’s okay to type while you’re mad, but if you’re like me, and your skin heats up when you’re angry and you get all green and violent (I type really loudly), it’s probably a good moment to step back and think about why you’re angry. After all, GPL says this is allowed, right? I get mad because of perceived ownership. It’s one of my things. You should never claim to be something you’re not and you shouldn’t sell something that isn’t yours.
And that’s the angle I’d use to approach the situation. I would find the person, ping them privately if possible (almost everyone has a contact page these days) and ask them if they could change the wording to make it clear that this isn’t their code, it’s mine, and they’re using and providing it without the support of the original author. That’s what my friend did, and that’s also what the other people whose themes were being resold did. They pointed out that the reselling was confusing to the customers, and the customers got an unlicensed product.
What if that fails? Well. Now it’s messy. Legally if they’re taking my content and putting it up on their site with verbiage that implies it’s theirs, I have a DMCA takedown right. My content is all under copyright (I have not, nor will I any time soon, chose to go copyless) and I use the CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license, so if you use my content, wholesale, without attribution, you’re stealing. But this isn’t about my content, it’s my code, and all my code is released GPLv2 (unless otherwise noted). That means in order for me to come up and tap your shoulder, you have to take my code and my content.
Boy this got complicated. But if I ping you and say “Hey, bro, not cool.” and you ignore me, or tell me to sod off, I’ll come back and ping your webhost. “Hi, this guy is stealing my content. I asked him nicely to stop. Here’s a copy of our conversation.” I should note, none of the times I’ve ever had to do this have gotten past this step. The hosts have always stepped in, poked the perpetrator, and that was that. The times I was the bad guy (reprinting news articles), the content owners have only ever had to ask me to take it down. It’s never gotten past me.
Well okay, so what happens if the host says “Tough luck” or “We agree, but we can’t do anything without a takedown notice.” Now you bring in the law and file a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) take down. DMCA is a U.S Copyright Law covering intellectual property. Your blog posts and ad-copy are your intellectual property. This went to a pretty dark place, didn’t it? I mean, I hate the DRM with a passion, and I freely give away my stuff, so let’s stop talking about the legal stuff. You can look it up on your own if you really want to know how to file all that.
Most of the ‘handling’ of someone who steals your stuff isn’t even the legal hassle, anyway. It’s just the pain of getting in touch with them, explaining the situation, and getting it sorted. And the headaches come from having to explain over and over that you’re not mad (though you probably are) and you just want them to stop making it look like they’re you, please and thank you.
Okay, so how might I justify selling someone else’s theme or plugin? I would sell a service. It’s really that simple. I would sell the downloading, installing, configuring, and tweaking of the product. I would charge them the raw cost of the product AND give them the license information (it’s their now). I may charge them for some ‘placeholder’ text to import via the WP importer, and to import it. Certainly I would charge for some training on how to do this going forward. But the thing I wouldn’t do is actually say “This is our plugin” or “This is my theme.” Because it’s not.
I’m just making sure you can have the theme better, faster, and easier. Plus now they can upgrade and I can go to Fiji!



Tunnel vision is something that happens to all of us. We look at the world from our perspective (yes, I was Captain Obvious there, I know), which means when most people remark that a project needs something, what they really mean is they need it. This is the part of passion that escalates into angry and vitriol remarkably fast, by the way, so if you’ve ever seen someone go from zero to abusive in three comments, that’s often what’s going on. They really want something to the point that they see red and can’t get out of their tunnel.
If you’re stuck between writing code you like to do a feature you want and writing code someone else wants and you don’t have an investment in, you’re probably going to do what you want. This is the reason that’s hardest to understand, and it’s the one most people call ‘unprofessional’ because it boils down to “Oh you don’t like something so you’re not doing it?” If this was iOS or MS Word, yeah, you’d get fired. But this is Open Source, and the rules are a little different here. We make what we make out of that same passion you have to see what you want to see.
Oh, in the short term they’re helping you by giving you something for free. They’re getting you further in your site development than ever before. However that help ends at the provisioning level, because you aren’t paying for support from these resellers, you’re paying for product. That’s okay, so long as you know what you’re paying for, and a lot of people don’t. If people did know what they were paying for, they wouldn’t use nulled themes with base64 backdoors in them.
So back to this whole “I’ll take your paid software and give it away” thing.


My major issue with Jekyll is that the ‘Simple’ directions aren’t obvious the way everyone seems to think they are. I mean, yes, they’re simple, but they lead you to some pretty crazy misconceptions based on how websites and CMSs work, and have worked, for a long time. And given all the posts I’ve read about how terrible WordPress is, my remark on that is: No, Jekyll is not terrible, but it has an audience.
DaFUQ?



