I don’t mind there being links in the themes, and if they have to remain intact because of a license then I probably won’t use the theme.

Also, for Themey’s case in particular, in his defense, on his site he does note that themes are sponsored. I noticed it the first time I went and looked at one of his themes linked from Blogging Tools. It even says it in his blog header. And I really think people are coming down on him too hard and spamming (ironic?) every one of his posts to the themeviewer etc. with sensationalist “THIS IS SPAM” comments is too much and unfair.

That being said, whereas I did see the “sponsored themes” bit on his, I didn’t realize that equated to links in the theme’s footer. Honestly, this is my fault, because I just didn’t bother trying to find out what that meant. But on some of the other sites linking to themes (the theme viewer, etc.) there is no mention of sponsorship etc.

I personally have never used or downloaded any of his themes (personal preference, nothing against him personally or his designs, I just like playing with sandbox more than actually posting anything on my site), but I don’t blame him for what he is doing, and in the end it really is up to the end user to be aware of what they are putting on their site. If I did use one of his themes I am confident I would have caught the links, because I never use a theme without tweaking/rearranging things a bit.

Up to this point I think we’re basically on the same page.

However, I do think it would be nice if the themes explicitly stated that they have those links and whether those links must remain intact because of a license. Disclaimer, simple note, license whatever.

I probably wouldn’t download or use themes that have these types of links in them if they are mandatory (it’s possible I’d make exceptions for links to sites I actually use and felt okay about tacitly recommending) and I would like to know they exist before spending my time downloading and messing with the theme.

I also think that sites that provide links to the themes do have a responsibility to let us know what they are linking to (the same goes for plugins, I hate going to look at an interesting plugin just to find out it is commercial and will cost me $50) because if they don’t then they really end up being of much less use to me and I end up not using them anymore.

This really is just an extension of my belief that theme (and plugin for that matter) authors should provide users with as much information about their creations beforehand, as is possible.

That all being said, I would like to stress the fact that I have no problems with the themes being sponsored if they are clearly labeled as such (whether I personally choose to use them or not).

I’m not so sure of my point about necessary cost now.

ShareALike Attribution left room for custom requirements, which to me means you can make it a requirement to keep both author and sponsor links in tact.

In the end, it’s up to us to decide whether to use a theme, but not all of us are aware of Google’s policy and how the sponsor is benefiting from the link.

So even when people know the sponsor link is there, they might not know what they’re getting into.

To have an uneditable theme, you’d have to release it under the No Derivitive Works license - but again, I don’t know exactly how that would be enforced. From what I gather, Creative Commons is a copyright license, meaning that if you alter work under a No Derivitive Works license then you could technically get sued. That’s my understanding, anyway.

I still feel that it’s the end-user’s responsibility to thoroughly check the theme before using it, but I suppose it’s not a bad idea to have some sort of disclaimer. Still, I think that perhaps WordPress themes might be better off with their own license rather than simple disclaimers.

I can’t decide whether labeling a sponsored theme as free is dishonest because it is free…but it isn’t.

Obviously, there has to be compromise. It’s unfair to theme users that don’t know what PR, backlink, and Google’s webmaster guidelines are.

I think the disclaimer is a necessary cost that sponsored themes has to pay, especially when they’re “mingling” with non-sponsored themes.

So do you think that saying a sponsored theme is free is being dishonest? I disagree. Unlike the freeware/adware debate of yore, ad-sponsored themes (at least, the ones I’ve seen) don’t require you to keep the ad in the theme, so it’s not like you’ll get a crippled theme if you remove the ad.

My beef is that I don’t think we really need disclaimers for any of this. As you know, the themes are free and are generally published under CC licenses, allowing users to do whatever they want with the themes; as such, the end-users need to take responsibility for themselves and take care to remove ads if that’s what they’d like to do with the theme. I just don’t think it’s fair to the theme designer to preface their work with a warning label, which can only have negative effects.

Perhaps instead of adding disclaimers to themes, there needs to be a specific WP license established, one that goes beyond the protections of the CC license and says that the author linkback and/or the ad link need to remain intact?

Second - I read the comments and not all sides are telling the whole truth. That’s why the debate is still going on.

I think the CC license to credit the theme author should be the default disclaimer. Any theme with an extra sponsor link should come with an EXTRA disclaimer.

If we start slapping warning messages on every theme, whether it’s about author or sponsor linking, of course it’s going to discourage people from downloading the themes. And that’s a bad thing.

I chose not to get into the debate because my horoscope warned me about it.