The reason I say this is the courts are used to dealing with these kind of situations that lean slightly more towards the “cut and dry” end of things (I stress the word “lean” as in nothing in the courts is really that cut and dry thanks to the lawyers and big corporations throwing up smoke shows). For example, throw “Big Operating System Company” (BOSC–pick one, either one) against a program developer into the courts to decide whether the program developer violated the license agreement between BOSC and said developer is one thing–not too many shades of gray there as we’ve seen in the past. But throw FOSS/GPL against a theme developer copying and pasting chunks of a FOSS/GPL blogging/CMS platform into his non-FOSS/GPL theme and you might as well fill the courthouse sprinkler system with gray paint and let it loose.

The reason the FOSS/GPL thing has worked so well up to now is because it has stayed out of the courts for the most part. But shine the legal spotlights onto it and (God forbid) let lawyers get a hold of this particular situation (who don’t know the first thing about dealing with FOSS/GPL most likely) and just watch what happens.

Too bad Matt and Chris can’t come to a compromise or just haul back and let it lie. Taking it to court might cause more trouble than it’s worth.

Just my opinion mind you…

See, my knowledge of theme-making runs about as far as being able to edit a style sheet to change the color of something. The whole argument on Chris’ side makes it sound like the Thesis theme does not use any of the code from WP at all. I understand that it calls on WP functions, but I was not aware that some of the code is actually copy/paste directly from WP. That definitely changes things in my mind

Mitch,

My argument wasn’t that Thesis doesn’t need WP to work, but that needing something to be functional is not how I interpret the term “derivative.” It’s the pants-belt argument that I made in another comment. I definitely see the other side of things, though…I think the term derivative is super unclear.