Cory Miller’s iThemes is now completely GPL compliant! This is great news indeed and they are the second premium theme vendor who fully support the GPL and align their business models with that of WordPress and its community. Cory is a friend of mine and in full disclosure, has been an advertiser on this blog in the past. We have had various discussions about this topic and I am very happy that they have made the switch. Everyone will be better off for it.
This change means that all themes purchased from iThemes can be installed on multiple blogs without restriction but they will continue to be supported as before. iThemes will continue to sell their themes and packages and provide the support for their themes but their themes will now be licensed under the GPL. This will mean more freedom for developers working with iThemes products (and thus more sales), will lead to better and quicker resolution of issues (lesser support costs) and will encourage development and improvement of iThemes products across the board (better products for the end user and for the WordPress community). I did not want this news to be lost in the excitement of the WordPress 2.8 release and wanted to congratulate Cory on his decision.
Cory and iThemes, welcome to the family!
Really a great news. Hats off to these guys who put all their effort to make WordPress look more beautiful and remain under GPL. Earlier it was Justin Tadlock moving to GPL model and now iThemes, More developers should enter this model.
Definitely, a very bold step. Good Luck!
This is fantastic news, well done Cory for making the shift! I absolutely love the iThemes and have purchased a few including the 3 ithemes package and Flexx amongst others.
This couldn’t have come at a better time as I am in the early stages of developing sites for clients and ithemes is a popular choice for CMS based sites.
Great news!
Nikki
Great news!
But what is the first “premium theme vendor who fully support the GPL”?
One of the companies on my list of three which I never would have thought to go full on GPL. My list has shrunk to one and last I checked, the company was starting to turn around.
Excellent news – I love that Cory and Brian are both taking a bold approach to setting an example for other premium theme developers.
The information in the post is a bit incorrect, at least to me. There are several premium theme sites that are fully aligned with the GPL. I would hardly call iThemes the second. Not to put iThemes down or anything; I’m glad they made the switch.
I guess it depends on how Mark is defining “premium.” I moved toward this last September with Theme Hybrid, but I phased out my non-GPL themes, giving users time to switch to fully-compliant GPL themes.
Brian Gardner done this sometime last fall. There was probably someone else before us.
Elevate Themes (by Nathan Rice of iThemes) has GPL-licensed themes. Ian Stewart releases premium themes under the GPL on ThemeShaper. Spectacu.la recently moved to all GPL themes. Press75 uses the GPL too. I’d wager there are other places where you can find GPL-licensed themes as well.
Fully GPL compliant is what I was aiming for.
Mark, thanks for the post … I’ve appreciated your input and wisdom along the way as we’ve contemplated this switch.
We’re eager to see where this takes our business …
Where can I get iThemes? Is it free?
This is great news, I always wanted to use one of iThemes, thanks for sharing.
Hatts off for Cory + iThemes 🙂