By matt mullenweg on

It is now over half a year since an adaptation of the Garland theme was added to WordPress.com.

Garland was subsequently disabled for new users because despite the positively-spun entry above, some core Drupal contributors were outraged and thought its use on WP.com was going to hurt Drupal's upcoming 5.0 release where the new default look was a major selling point.

http://acko.net/blog/wordpress-com-copies-drupal-theme

Now that a fair amount of time has passed and everyone has calmed down if you guys think the theme being available for WordPress.com impacted the Drupal 5.0 release, either positively or negatively.

I'm curious mainly to help inform future actions and decisions. Do you have an opinion?

Comments

artha6’s picture

artha6 commented

well !! in my opinion themes shouldnt affect popularity or value for either of them.
anyways most of this theme's are open source and adapted to drupal or wordpress.

ideally they should be used as stepping stone for creating website for advance users.

wordpress may be sued by lot of non-technical users, but drupal is a diffrent case.

i think drupal should be fine with lots of theme's and genric themes

my personal opinion, no offences to anyone sir

matt mullenweg’s picture

matt mullenweg commented

Thanks for the response.

matt mullenweg’s picture

matt mullenweg commented

http://www.linux.com/feature/120635

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

I still believe that the taking of an unreleased show case project theme design out of the development line CVS before it is released on a completely different projects signature site, not originally crediting the original author or designer is in general a discourteous and rude thing to do and negatively impacts peoples view of the project that does this.

As Steven said before the ported theme was released, per the GPL you were certainly allowed to do this. Porting a theme and releasing on your own signature site before a different project has done this was in poor taste, thoughtless and seemed selfish. Porting a theme after release is, in my opinion, not in bad taste. Doing so before is certainly something else.

People are also allowed to be outraged at this. As an analogy, my neighbor has a 'right' to not shower, this doesn't mean I don't think he doesn't stink but it does mean I will avoid association or contact with him.

Other then as a focused blogging tool, I didn't have much of an opinion of Wordpress before the issue occurred. I have a definite opinion of Wordpress now.

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide