[theme-reviewers] GPL-Compatibility

Bryan Hadaway bhadaway at gmail.com
Thu Jun 5 19:25:41 UTC 2014


I'll just jump in to clear up one thing real quick here in our email
discussion before wrapping it up or moving it elsewhere.

@Chip - You misunderstood what @Greg and I were discussing (at least what I
was discussing) before you replied.

What we were saying, is that whether someone declares a license for
something or whether they state it as public domain or whatever, you can
never be certain that's true because what if you went to some stock photo
website where some user has been uploading images, "releasing" them as
public domain, but truthfully, they were just stealing copyrighted images
from other people's blogs and claiming them as their own.

Furthermore, and I know many of us have seen this in the past, someone can
certainly say that something is 100% GPL, but under scrutiny we might find
that it's not true at all, that there is in fact a proprietary
license/stipulation in place that is not compatible with GPL.

What it comes down to, is a good faith belief that something is 100%
GPL-compatible, it's impossible to know for sure. So, we can only do our
best to review the sources at face-value in which we use 3rd party assets.

And then another degree of separation is for the reviewer of a theme to
believe that that theme developer took the time to make sure all that has
already been worked out, because it would be an insanely long process to
review if every piece of a theme needed to be scrutinized for licensing.

It is what it is, is really the only conclusion here.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wordpress.org/pipermail/theme-reviewers/attachments/20140605/8fcdfeb3/attachment.html>


More information about the theme-reviewers mailing list