The Redhead
aka
Erika (@RedheadWriting)

First, the guy is an attorney who went to law school. Second, he states on his site (maybe in his comments, I can’t remember exactly which of his two posts) that he used to have a practice that included intellectual property and copyright law. Third, he sites a court opinion that may apply to GPL licenses and themes.

He doesn’t need to be a currently practicing attorney working on high profile cases to be right or insightful. He doesn’t put himself forth as an expert on software, but instead simply states the legal differences between concepts in the tech discourse and legal discourse.

As for balance, I would say the he seems to be neutral. Meaning, he doesn’t have a horse in this race, doesn’t have an axe to grind, and seems open to interpreting new facts and nuances from a cogent perspective (e.g.: the revelation about the GPL code included in Thesis).

On the other hand, Matt Mullenwag et. al. can only reference the attorneys who receive their paychecks working for the GPL and Open Source causes. These are paid advocates paid for advocacy along the lines Matt is arguing.

They may be right. But they are not balanced or impartial arbiters.

Although I’m neither a software coder nor an attorney, I’ve followed a lot of intellectual property issues for the past 15+ years, and I’ve also taken graduate level business law classes in copyright and intellectual property. The WordPress.org camp seems to know a lot about coding but practically nothing about copyright law and how licenses and contracts cannot override copyright or have selective application.

One of the basics of copyright is that it’s a right to control copies of one’s creative work. If Chris Pearson’s Thesis merits its own copyright, then his stubbornness on not releasing Thesis may run counter to the WordPress community’s mores, but is fully within his rights.

On the other hand, if he’s violated someone else’s copyrights to WordPress, then the author/copyright holder for WordPress can initiate infringement proceedings against him to stop the infringement.

I suspect Pearson has plans to release Thesis without WordPress somehow as its own, independent publishing platform and perhaps continue selling it as an add-on to WordPress or other platforms in the interim. Issuing Thesis under the GPL would force new versions of Thesis to be completely new code from the old Thesis to avoid inheriting the GPL restraints for his business model.

It’s certainly not an ad hominem attack when discussing an extremely niche, specialized area of the law. We as non-lawyers can throw around definitions of the word ‘derivative’ all day long but that doesn’t mean we’re basing it on solid legal footing. When discussing something you know nothing about, as is done commonly in the court system, it is perfectly acceptable, even encouraged, to defer to experts.

Honestly, you and I aren’t qualified to make any assertions here either. But we can for fun, so why don’t you take down the serious level a notch?