GPL Themeforest Themes

This topic has 3 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 5 years, 11 months ago by Dirk B.

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October 11, 2016 at 2:50 pm #18005

Jessica Gody
Participant

First of all, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS SITE!!! It has been a huge help.

I did browse through the forums and saw some mention of Themeforest but didn’t locate quite what I was looking for.

What are the chances of you all adding GPL Themeforest themes?

Thank you!

October 11, 2016 at 4:37 pm #18007
7h3h
Keymaster
Thank you Jessica for your feedback about GPLDL.

Regarding Themeforest Themes: There are very few items that are explicitly 100% GPL licensed – an this is what we have been focusing on with GPLDL. Envato claims that most WordPress themes on the market place should have a “regular license” that you can find here:

https://themeforest.net/licenses/standard

and here

https://help.market.envato.com/hc/en-us/articles/202501064

Let’s discuss. What is your view on that?
- This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by 7h3h.
December 18, 2017 at 3:53 am #19591

Dirk B
Participant

When it comes to WordPress Plugins and Themes, they have to be released under the WordPress GPL license. See https://wordpress.org/about/license/.

Envato’s license only covers items where copyright can be claimed eg. images or non WordPress scripts etc. See Envato knowledgebase https://help.market.envato.com/hc/en-us/articles/202501064?_ga=2.266354634.577689901.1513537155-1604268018.1513076182 and I quote “Authors of items made for GPL-based platforms can also choose to offer some individual items as 100% GPL. This applies only to WordPress themes and plugins currently. “. There is an argument that the CSS and JS files included in plugins and themes are not covered by GPL, however that argument does not hold as you cannot seperate the CSS and JS from the PHP part of the plugin. All three elements has to be provided in order for the plugin or theme to operate.

The plugin or theme also cannot be used on its own, it has to be installed on the WordPress platform and by extention utilises the same GPL license as WordPress itself.

December 28, 2017 at 5:57 am #19607

Dirk B
Participant

Further to my previous comment, there was an article from https://wordpress.org/news/2009/07/themes-are-gpl-too/ where the Software Freedom Law Center was asked to interpret what constitute derivative work. Any part of the plugin or theme that calls any of the WordPress core function are considered part of the derivative work. Therefor it holds that in order to make the JS or CSS available to the browser, they have to be enqued, using wp_enque_style or wp_enque_script. In my opinion that means that they are derivatives of WordPress, which means they fall under the GPL license.
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