Hugothemes: Should we accept commercial themes?

[bep]

See https://github.com/gohugoio/hugoThemes/commit/ba54054ef32ebce5f77487ac64b82e418816626c

This theme has a "custom license" and comes with an attached 50% rebate coupon for the "full version".

The license itself is _maybe_ OK, but the full picture here is that we are promoting a product that has a price. We suddenly became a commercial store, but we see none of the money.

I'm going to, temporary, revert the commit above until we can establish some kind of policy.

[digitalcraftsman]

We suddenly became a commercial store, but we see none of the money.

One the one hand I can understand your concern that we're promoting/advertising themes without getting something in return.

On the other one I would like to see a growing ecosystem around Hugo that also consists of high-quality themes, similar to Jekyll's. We could benefit from such an ecosystem as well because it makes Hugo more attractive for users and webdesigners / developers.

Furthermore, I had a look at various websites that host a similar theme registry for Jekyll, Hexo and Ghost themes. While searching for contribution guidelines I found none that excluded paid themes nor do they charge a provision.

[bep]

The Fisher themes (or whatever) looks beautiful, but there are not doubt he runs a business, and these ports to Hugo and Jekyll etc. with "if you leave the copyright etc. you can use it for free but if you pay" is a promotional thing for him, a shareware kind of thing, a try before you buy. The "license" text itself isn't really a license that would put any lawyer to rest, so if I was thinking about running a commercial business with this theme, I would probably think that I would have to pay him the money just to make sure.

Saying that "the Jekyll theme site hosts these themes" is not a very good argument either.

Note that this isn't a "I want money thing", either, but having thought a little about this would put us in a better situation if that questions pops up in the future.

My thoughts on this is:

Hosting themes that are also available in a paid version is fine as long as:

• It contains a LICENSE file with one of the widely accepted open source licenses (note that no OSS license I know of has any transfer of copyright, so the theme creator is the copyright holder). So no made up "you can use my theme for free provided that you ...".
• The theme demo/site isn't _too_ promotional.
• We do no HugoLovers coupons promotions.

Remember that the common man expects to be able to clone and just try browse the themes until he/she finds one that looks OK.

The problem with this is that most open source licenses is very permissive about forking. In this case it was OK to fork if you get explicit permission from the theme author or something ... So I'm not even sure it is possible to find a good license (maybe if we included the CC?).

[digitalcraftsman]

@jhabdas it can happen that you sometimes don't get what you paid for. But webdesigners/devs have to earn their money as well when they create new templates / themes.

@bep he's obviously doing themefisher for a living.

with "if you leave the copyright etc. you can use it for free but if you pay" is a promotional thing for him, a shareware kind of thing, a try before you buy.

That's literally the "price" you pay when you use the theme under the conditions of the free license. Theme users don't face any functional constraints when using this license. If they can live with the copyright notice, then it's fine. Users how would like to remove it, especially businesses, have to have to pay for it.

What actually seems to be worrying you is that commercial businesses are rather enforced to pay for the theme "just to make sure". Isn't this a general problem with paid templates and themes? From what I've seen over the time the kind of license seems to be commonly used.

Note that this isn't a "I want money thing", either, but having thought a little about this would put us in a better situation if that questions pops up in the future.

Yes, we essentially become a middleman and I understand that you've no dollar signs in your eyes. In your first comment you've said:

"We suddenly became a commercial store, but we see none of the money."

So at the bottom line: would you like to get a small provision, or would you like to establish an optional donation system for the Hugo project or skip the monetary aspect at all.

Could you please elaborate a bit further in which direction you're preferably heading?

Hosting themes that are also available in a paid version is fine as long as it contains a LICENSE file with one of the widely accepted open source licenses (note that no OSS license I know of has any transfer of copyright, so the theme creator is the copyright holder)

Using such a license would help to solve the potential issue that users feel to be enforced to by a license. I'm not aware of an open source license either that would be easy to use in this case. Maybe a dual-licensed theme (for personal and commercial use) could help.

AFAIK it's not possible to transfer the copyright. The creator(s) is/are the copyright holders by default. It's only possible to give users usage rights which define the conditions i.e. the do's and don'ts.

The theme demo/site isn't too promotional.
We do no HugoLovers coupons promotions.

I agree on that.

Remember that the common man expects to be able to clone and just try browse the themes until he/she finds one that looks OK.

We should definitely mark those themes as (semi)-paid themes so that users aren't surprised.

Excuse the lengthy and pedantic post. I just try to get a better aspects of your reasoning to find a compromise :wink:

[anthonyfok]

For reference:

• This issue was mentioned in https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/can-i-submit-freemium-theme-to-hugo-theme-directory/11660
• Themefisher's Airspace theme for Hugo, which started this discussion in the first place, has recently been accepted after switching to an open-source license, see #330

[onedrawingperday]

We should definitely mark those themes as (semi)-paid themes so that users aren't surprised.

I agree. Also this theme (that I reviewed last week) has a link to a pro version (with additional features) in the README.

[digitalcraftsman]

We already have added a few commercial themes with the pro versions and found a baseline of what are the do's and don'ts for this kind of themes. Further information have been added to the README.

For future submitters of commercial themes please have a look a the themes of @ themefisher for successfully added themes.