Several days ago there was a sort of blow-up on several of the Wordpress community sites, and related blogs dealing with “sponsored themes”. AS you probably know, Wordpress’ display layer is referred to as a “theme” and as with anything else, there are thousands of themes available for download all over the Web.

Turns out may of these themes, even though advertised as “free” are in fact “sponsored” by the inclusion of several links in the template. These links could go to any sort of site, and obviously, a lot of them are sponsored by the types of sites that most folks wouldn’t want links to on their blog. The argument that “people can just remove the links” is being made by many of the posters – although certainly not by the designers of these themes in question.

I first read about this here, on Lorelle on Wordpress.

Even Matt Mullenweg weighed in on this issue, here.  And on his own blog, here.

Anybody who’s done any sort of searching for these things will easily spot that this blog’s current theme is a lightly tweaked version of someone’s “free” theme. In fact, it until recently featured sponsored links in the template, which I have removed by editing several files in the theme. So that leaves me here…

As long as I’m just fooling around with the header, the sidebar, colors and link structure, etc. I’m just iterating on someone else’s work, which clearly falls under the “fair use” assumptions that we all make when we download a “free” template. However, once I remove the sponsored links, for whatever reason, then I’m stealing the theme.

The theme’s designer, on the download page and in comments in the code, clearly states that the theme is “sponsored” and offers a $10 sponsored-links-free version of the theme, so it’d be hard to make the case that a person had NO CLUE these links were going to show up on their site.

So really, in good conscience, I need to either put the links back, pay the $10, or port over the blog to a truly free theme. I guess I could do neither, and just figure that no one’s going to notice or care – but that’s not really the right thing to do – and this has been tugging at the edges of my conscience for the last week or so, so I guess I need to migrate to a new theme. Kubrick, anyone?