I have nothing against developers trying to make a profit from their work. I happen to like it (a lot) when I can make money off working with WordPress. It’s something I enjoy doing, and being paid to do something I love makes it that much easier to focus my time there.
But sometimes … the way people make money off WordPress irritates me to no end. Case in point: Thesis.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Thesis is a great system. But the way their sales model is built actually does more harm than good. I’m talking mostly about the non-GPL nature of their theme and the paid support forums.
This past week, a user of my free, open source WordPress plug-in JS Banner Rotate contacted me to ask for help. It seems that a particular feature (the ability to make the banner a link to another page) was working in everything but Internet Explorer. I poked around for a bit using the IE developer toolbar, but couldn’t figure out what was causing the problem.
So I’ve marked it as a “known feature” and put fixing it on my to-do list. The trouble is, I can’t reproduce his environment on my local machine and I can’t poke at the code.
Because he’s building on Thesis and can’t give me a copy of the system without violating his license.
So, in an attempt to make things easier, he’s started a support thread on the Thesis forums:
Hey Eric,
I just posted this thread to the community forum for the Thesis theme. It contains more information about what I’ve done to date. We’ll see if any other Thesis users have encountered this issue.
One problem here … I’m not a Thesis subscriber and have no access to these member-only forums!
I have no problem with people using my systems in their websites or bundling them for client projects. Actually, that’s why I wrote them in the first place. What I do have a problem with is people placing obstacles in my path when I try to provide support. I would gladly offer advice and troubleshooting in this forum if I could, and I would love to be able to follow this particular discussion thread.
But I will not pay $87 to buy a license and subscription so I’ll have access to a forum to help someone fix a system I gave away for free.
Open Message to all Premium WordPress Service Providers
If you provide a premium service and have a members-only section of your support forums, please offer a free access level for other service providers. We’re all building systems used by the same people, and we can accomplish much more working together and providing collaborative support than we can by splintering the community in such a way.
No developer should ever have to pay to support their own work!
Update: 11:30AM
Thanks for all the comments and feedback. Please read my follow-up post to continue the conversation.
I agree that this is frustrating. I recently noticed that my stats were showing hit’s from a popular theme shop’s private forums. I emailed their team to see if they could provide a transcript of the thread and they did this almost immediately. I was pretty impressed with their willingness to share this information but was let down when I actually read the contents of the thread. Someone needed similar functionality provided by one of my plugins. Someone else suggested that they use on of my plugins and gave it serious props. The original someone said they didn’t understand something and asked for help. At this point an administrator replied to thread saying that “3rd party” solutions could not be supported in their forums. This upset me a little bit. I don’t shoot down the use of premium themes. I actually advocate it to people who need a killer looking site on the cheap. I’ve suggested this same company more than once to users in the past looking for nice looking themes. As a developer of free WordPress extensions, it’s a shame to see this kind of behavior. I applaud you for putting together this post and sharing your experience. It will be interesting to read what free providers have experienced when dealing with commercial providers.
I do not believe that him giving you, in a developer-client relationship, a copy of Thesis for the sole purpose of diagnosing and fixing a bug/known issue between Thesis and your Plugin, violates the Thesis license agreement, as it does not constitute “distribution”. (That’s not to say that you couldn’t thereafter violate Thesis’ license, by continuing to use that copy of Thesis, for other purposes.)
Thus, I would assert that your premise is specious. Just ask your client for a copy of Thesis that you can use to diagnose and fix the problem.
By many other developers’ definition, giving me a copy would, in fact, be distribution … even if the intention is only diagnostic. I’ve ran face-first into that issue with other theme shops before, and considering the legendary arguments over Thesis and licensing in the WP community, that’s not a road I’d even want to look at right now.
The “other developers’ definition” doesn’t matter; only copyright law matters.
There isn’t a copyright court in this country (I don’t know about anywhere outside the USA) that is going to rule that such limited-scope use (bug diagnosis/fix), under a client-developer relationship, and especially for the purpose of ensuring interoperability between the copyrighted work and another work, constitutes copyright infringement.
(Besides: Thesis’ PHP is licensed under GPL; so, your user can freely distribute to you the Thesis PHP – conveniently, the actual part of the code that you need – for any purpose whatsoever.)
This is a good point Eric, I’ve recently developed a website to sell premium skins for thesis theme, and I was thinking of a way to give free access to those who would like to have access without having to buy anything! especially to the support forum section where they can learn or share their thoughts and ideas with members, and I have done it!
I agree with what’s on your post here, and I actually think that it’s even better if wordpress theme designers could provide free copies for developers.
And, personally I would give a copy to my developer if this is required for my site development without asking for permission from anyone!