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…