[wp-hackers] A question about donation link

[Mike Schinkel]

On Jan 15, 2010, at 4:44 PM, Jordi Canals wrote:
> I just asked this to the Free Source Foundation recently. You know them
> create and maintain the licenses and clarify any doubt about the licenses.
> For GPLv3, you can read :
> 
> You may supplement the terms of this License with terms: [...]
> Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author
> attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed
> by works containing it;
> 
> Them said that a small public credit on theme page footer is really a
> "reasonable author attribution".
> Also section 2c for GPLv2 states something similar.
> 
> The license recommends to output a copyright notice to the normal program
> output, and this credits cannot be removed. For a desktop program, the
> normal output is the user screen, the same for a web program (in this case
> this goes to the user screen in form of a web page).

If that is truly the case (which we can't know for sure unless and until it is litigated) then it's author's choice, not an absolute "can't."

> In my case (for my themes) I don't mind as I explicitly allow to remove
> public theme credits and I allow to remove the author attribution from the
> page footer.
> 
> Any way if GPL allows it or not, I think it's a nice practice to give credit
> to authors that work hard to give us a lot of free software. As most of
> those authors don't ask us to pay a cent for great software, the minimum we
> can do, is to credit them for their hard work.

No disagreement there.  All I was discussing was if it was an option or not.

-Mike