Yes, you heard me right. iThemes, one of the biggest and most well-known WordPress premium design vendors, is now going GPL. What this means is that themes are going to be cheaper, if you buy a theme, you can use it on as many websites that you want, and much more. This is the second move from a big theme developing company to go GPL, the first one being Studio Press (aka Revolution themes).
Here are some of their reasons behind the switch:
- Ultimately, we want to do what’s best for the WordPress – this is a strong signal of support from us to say we love and embrace open source software and WordPress
- We want to be a respected and valued member of the WordPress community –part of this move is for our team, like our developers Chris and Nathan, to be able to participate and contribute freely in the development of WordPress without restraint or hindrance for the better of … WORDPRESS
- What helps WordPress, helps you (our customer and the grand community), and ultimately helps us (and vice versa – it’s reciprocal) – that means that when we develop a cool feature on top of WordPress, it can easily be included back into the core software of WordPress to improve and innovate together in true open source fashion that leverages talent across the world in different realms, businesses, etc.
- Being open source is sooooo web 2.0 and the future and has tangible benefits for all – We feel this switch is a celebration for open source philosophy that has made WordPress so popular and we hope our customers and others will be as excited as we are to move in this direction!
Check out the details at ithemes website.