In case you've missed the latest happenings in the WordPress community, Marco Tabini is here to catch you up. The issue? Licensing of themes for WordPress.

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.

On the GitHub Support forums Kastner has proposed an idea - making something similar to gethub gems but for PHP:

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.

David Goodwin has pointed out a new open source project that the PalePurple group are releasing - the Virtual Planning Board.

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.

David Goodwin has pointed out a new open source project that the PalePurple group are releasing - the Virtual Planning Board.

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.

Toomas Romer has posted about his latest release for the framework he's developed to create a simple Eclipse plugin with PHP.

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.

Toomas Romer has posted about his latest release for the framework he's developed to create a simple Eclipse plugin with PHP.

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.

As mentioned in this new post on the php|architect website, the eZ Systems group have announced a new extension for their software (eZ Publish) to link with an Oracle database, under a GPL license no less.

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.

As mentioned in this new post on the php|architect website, the eZ Systems group have announced a new extension for their software (eZ Publish) to link with an Oracle database, under a GPL license no less.

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 Shiflett has some good news for all of the Zend Framework fans out there - the license that it's under is now compatible with the GPL.

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.

Chris Shiflett has some good news for all of the Zend Framework fans out there - the license that it's under is now compatible with the GPL.

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.