Much hubbub has been had about the (almost epic) fight between Matt Mullenweg, speaking for WordPress and – as far as most people are concerned – the sanctity of the GPL, and Chris Pearson waving the banner of Thesis and paid, non-GPL, premium themes.

I use Thesis on this site. Other than that, I have no stakes in it. I don’t like Chris, I am more than dissatisfied with this aloofness and elusiveness on the Thesis forums, and I am firmly of the belief that in this day and age of Twitter, Facebook, and social craze SEO is a dead horse which he beats too much. I don’t make money selling Thesis as an affiliate, and I don’t intent to use it for the rest of my days. One day something better will come along, and that’s when I’ll switch.

I like Matt. I really do. I remember getting him drunk on his 21st, rocking a gondola with him during a Napa Valley trip we organized, and terrorizing his first apartment in San Francisco. He convinced me to move from Drupal to WordPress sometime in 2006, and I think I still owe him five hundred bucks. Matt?

So, for all it’s worth, I should have a horse in this race tagging alongside Matt’s.

Here’s my issue, and it’s two-fold. First, I don’t like the GPL. Now, let me explain… I am all for liberal licensing. Heck, while working at Socialtext I pushed (and ultimately failed) for a license which would, in essence, declare web applications to be “shared” when served on a web server and require the code to be made public. Such efforts were included in the ill-fated Affero GPL and Mozilla’s MPL, but never took hold.

To Matt, the GPL is a magic bullet. One that saves the industry in and by itself. Pearson, on the other hand, is a pompous prick. No two ways about it. To Chris, he himself is the magic bullet. The one that saves and saved the industry on a daily basis, leaping tall SEO hurdles in a single bound. Both are wrong. Though, to be fair, being a pompous prick doesn’t harm one’s code and doesn’t diminish one’s actual achievements. While I might disagree with Chris being one of the top three names in WordPress, without Thesis I might have reverted to Drupal in 2009.

The GPL is outdated. It used to be fine when NetHack made its round around the globe. Today, no one compiles games anymore. The desktop is the web, the web is the desktop. Welcome to HTML 5, the Cloud, and the elusive “social” animal. Code is written for the web, downloaded from the web, deployed onto the web, and used on the web. The GPL might as well not exist anymore, since I am able to share the fruits of my labor right here, online, letting you play with it, use it, without ever sharing a line of the code I plunged into the GPL base provided by Matt.

Sure, if I wanted to package it and distribute it, I’d have to. But who does that, these days? Instead of shipping CDs with code, port 80 does the trick. Instead of open raw data, APIs work for the common good. And that’s great, celebrate while the GPL revolution eats its children.

For me, however, if there is such a thing, there is a clear winner in this debate – Matt. I might disagree with the fundamental goodness of the GPL, but I appreciate a calm, level headed argument over egotistical chest thumping. I can “see” Matt’s point, I can’t see Chris’. Matt is a business man. Chris? He reminds me of all the other SEO types, the “don’t take no for an answer” attitude, the car-salesman manual, the stringent repetitiveness of small, ultimately fallacious, arguments until they become, at least in one’s own mind, true.

So, why am I still using Thesis, then?

In one sentence – because it, the code, the environment, sucks less. Ideology, friendships, and inherent good aside, none of Matt’s GPL’d framework options comes close.

I was all ready to leave, purchased Genesis from StudioPress. Turns out there’s a clause somewhere that I can’t get a refund if I don’t like it. Because, as StudioPress says, it’s downloaded code and therefore can’t be refunded. That very statement, right here, sadly invalidates Matt’s argument. Thesis, while restrictive and without the openness Matt seeks, at least gives me the liberty to drive before I buy (or ask for my money back). A liberty much, much, more fundamental than the implied contagiousness of the GPL which, as I said above, becomes a non-issue for the vast majority of theme code users.

I’m out sixty bucks, Genesis made some cash on me, and the code, free or not, now rots in my inbox. Until a commercial theme providing the same new-user friendliness (not by Chris, mind you, but the many users in the forums – once you strip the web business weirdness), a chance to test-drive the framework and the features of Thesis 1.8 comes along I simply can’t afford switching.

And that, sadly, is the issue all along – ideology should never override good business sense or serve as a substitute for good salesmanship.