Drupal Themes On eBay
Hi everyone.
Firstly, a Happy New Year etc. Work got a bit hectic over the Christmas period which resulted in the lack of posts recently, but I'm gradually cranking back into action.
Anyway, whilst doing a little holiday shopping last month I came across one of the several listings on eBay for Drupal themes. Naturally I had to take a closer look. Imagine my 'surprise' when I found out that this was in fact just a bundle of freely available themes.
I particularly like the part in the ad copy which says:
"They have taken us years to find and explore for quality to save you time and money" - really? Years?
There then follows a 'handy' explanation about how to install and enable your theme, which is written entirely in black font on a black background, and also contains out of date information - nice.
And just to finish off:
"These templates are FREE" - except, of course, when you buy them from this listing - oh dear.
Best to not even get started on the eBay Drupal ebook sellers ;)
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Are all of these licensed under the GPL, because if so, is there something we can do to stop this?
Khalid - yeah that sucks. But maybe the scarier thing is that people are actually buying the stuff.
Rob - my guess would be that the majority are licensed under the GPL, but I have a feeling that even if they are there's still technically nothing illegal in selling the themes. The ebooks, of course, are a completely different matter if the guy is not a licensed reseller.
Jeff Eaton has a post about Drupal and the GPL which goes into some more detail, and that links to a longer discussion on drupal.org. There's also a legal group with a few bits about GPL and Drupal which is worth checking out as well.
Isn't one of the reasons the drupal association exists to help provide resources to restrict this type of exploitation?
I don't think this is exploitation, it's just dumb. I don't think it's any different than the comparison that's always made with Redhat. All the software they sell is free in other places, you're just paying for the fancy packaging (in this case, the labor to collect and zip up all the themes).
On the other hand, I've never heard of a GPL Packt book, so that is probably a straightup copyright violation that Packt would have to pursue, not the DA, unless of course this guy is a legit reseller of some sort.
I hate to say it guys, but time-poor people will quite often forgo spending time researching stuff when someone has done it for them already, albeit with a dollar amount attached.
this ebay item in particular clearly states that all the themes are freely available on the net. granted, no-one who has actually gone to the effort of installing and learning drupal would ever dream of paying 5 bucks for a bit of google work, but you just never know.
as for people with gripes about selling linux on ebay - consider this:
not everyone (particularly outside of the US) is sat on the end of a fat pipe with loads of bandwidth. here in the UK, there are quite a few people who have "broadband" which most nerds wouldn't consider better than 56K. in fact, there's still a lot of people who can't even get anything except dialup due to geographical constraints.
so how would you like to download a DVD's worth of Linux iso over 56K?
yeah didn't think so.
or if you do have an always on connection, maybe you have a "email and light surfing" tariff which has heavy restrictions on the volume of data lets say 1 gig per month... you may not wish to waste that on a whim.
sure, you can call it exploitation or you could call it a service - which is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. for a lot of people that's nothing, some would rather pay someone else to do a bit of graft.
do you do all the repairs on your car/home? do you make all of your food from the ground to your plate?
I would if i could but there are only so many hours in any given day - you spend time on some tasks and money on others - the free market means you (usually) get to choose
(BTW, i'm not a seller of said packages, but can easily see why they can exist - with my new job i'm firmly in time-poor and such a pack may appeal to me when i put my site up - $5 or £2.50 is only equivalent to about 10 mins of my time (at my employers rate) so it kind of makes sense)
later
If they are licensed under GPL, we can't stop that.
That isn't illegal, see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
(it means free as free speech, not free as free beer)
iiiii
hi !! do you know of any ebooks that wud teach you drupal themeing and how do we optimise the use of blocks and panels.
Hi Namrata,
you could try checking out Pro Drupal Development by John K. VanDyk and Matt Westgate. You can download this as an ebook direct from Apress. Just follow the link, and you should see the 'Purchase As eBook' option.
Yes this sucks. Its just making money...if those guys would give something back to the programmer/designer it would be a good deal - but hey - Will they?? haha. No
I contacted that tool and told him that it was not cool to sell these free templates. I am an Ebay seller and Drupal user and it just pissed me off. He sent a snarky reply that said the license allowed him to do so. SO WHAT! There are many things in life we can do that we should not. What a loser!
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