dan13l
Member
Hi all,
I know it's a bit quiet around here, but I thought I'd ask what you guys make of the Revolution theme ditching the premium theme model and going open source?
I appreciate that the comparison isn't massively valid, as Spectacu.la sports a much lower price than Revolution ever did, but I'm interested given how vocal certain figures associate with WordPress have been on the issue.
Hi Daniel - it's an interesting one. My own view is that Revolution could fetch a premium while it was a new idea, but now nearly everyone's got a news theme the competition must be intense - heck, a client who'd paid for Revolution but needed our back-end quality got us to rebuild it completely. It took us just a week to do, pretty much from scratch. If you look at the Fresh News stuff they're way ahead of what he was doing.
We've discussed the idea of making our themes Open Source, while making the downloads and support only available here to members. In a way it makes sense - policing rip-offs is almost impossible... we couldn't afford to sue a company in Indonesia anyway... so our code would sell purely on trust unless we go the obfuscation route. But that would go against the grain. But no - instead we'll offer themes on at approximately 50% GPL, and 50% paid. Caribou, for example, will have a sophisticated and fully featured members only version, and there'll be a free version which removes a lot of the cleverness and navigation tricks but gives a nice and neat blog.
Sorry it's been quiet here - we've been busy working on our designs. Until our marketing starts we expect it'll stay that way, and we're not going to do any marketing until Caribou is released along with a third GPL theme.
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