The WordPress community is abuzz with news that the WP Foundation has essentially gone to war with the makers of the Thesis WP theme. The substance of the argument, as I understand it, is that the makers of WordPress claim that themes, since they rely on WP's GPL'ed code to run, must be covered by the GPL as well because they are derivative works. Thesis, on the other hand, is distributed under a commercial license, therefore violating this tenet.

Marco talks about all of the legal implications of the issue and some of the stances each side has taken - WordPress saying that since the code has a foundation on it, it must be covered and the themers saying that's ridiculous. As Marco points out, however, is that the opinions of non-legal professionals doesn't really matter. What matters is what would hold up if this issue were ever pressed into a legal arena. He even includes some suggestions he wishes the WPF would take to heart including to just back off.

Just like ruby/gems, PHP has a packaging/distribution system called PEAR. I think that running a pear channel would help the PHP community with things like GPL extensions, as well as increasing participation in the community. Thoughts?

There's already thirteen comments on the post, all supportive of the idea including interest from the GitHub folks themselves.

It's basically a piece of web-based software, written in Python and PHP, that allows you to allocate tickets from multiple Trac projects to a simple week-based 'board' in order to organise work priority for developers.

I've written about why we wanted this, and created a short user guide on the Trac site for the project. This is still in development and we're working on some more features (You can see what we've got planned from our timeline).

It's been released under the GPL and has a Subversion repository where you can grab the latest code from. There's also an installation guide that's been developed to help you get started.

After three weeks we have the next release of Eclipse Plugins in Php ready. The update site is the same.

Changes include a reworked API, the ability to pass method arguments to PHP, bundling of the Quercus software, a tests subproject, and an updated quick-start/step-by-step example. He explains the updates to the API and some of the licensing issues surrounding the use of Quercus in the post as well.

This extension was previously only available under a proprietary license and was sold from $899 to $2999. It is now freely available. Last year, eZ Systems also released the Online Editor, previously only available under a proprietary license, as Open Source software under the GPL.

For more information, check out the project's documentation on the extension or just download it and get busy working.

Chris notes also that it's a welcome change over to this pre-existing license to reduce the number of licenses that companies would have to change/evaluate.