We have an announcement to make – following our general shift in the open-source direction, we’ve decided to switch to fully GPL licensing for all of our premium WordPress themes on ThemeForest. While this might sound like just another legal formality, it’s actually more than that – read on for full details.
What Is GPL?
GPL stands for GNU General Public License and denotes a family of licenses which are united by the idea of open source. It has existed for more than three decades and is today one of the most popular forms of licensing for all kinds of software, most notably – the Linux operating system. GPL is a form of copyleft license, which means that any work derived from the initial product can be freely distributed, but only under the same license terms (i.e. GPL).
Does It Change Anything?
Indeed! The most important practical implication of the new licensing policy for our themes is that they can now be redistributed and/or resold by third parties (in this case – our ThemeForest buyers), under condition that it’s also done under the GPL license. In other words, we are giving up some of the control over the source code, most notably the CSS and JS components. It should be noted that all our ThemeForest items have remained exclusive to the ThemeForest platform, i.e. we’re not selling them anywhere else. You can check out our premium WordPress themes here.
What do you think about this decision? Let us know in the comments section below.
I think it’s great that you are doing that! I just got Bento for a site and having a user-friendly, beautiful experience so far!