I had a brief discussion with Matt in the comments on the source (http://www.designcrumbs.com/automatically-blackballed#comment-413 http://www.designcrumbs.com/

I had a brief discussion with Matt in the comments on the source (http://www.designcrumbs.com/automatically-blackballed#comment-413 http://www.designcrumbs.com/automatically-blackballed#commen...) and tried to get him to explain why a split-license was bad. Here is a quote: 'While legally you can make a technical argument that in a theme the PHP, CSS, JS, and images are separate things, from the point of view of a user they make up a single unit of usefulness, one “thing.” Users intuitively understand this, just like it’d be strange to have a car you could drive anywhere, but you had to remove the wheels if you went outside a certain area (the so-called “split license”). Most theme authors and businesses in the WP community also understand this, in fact all of the theme shops on the commercial themes page and many of the most successful including WooThemes and StudioPress sell 100% GPL themes that protect all the rights of their users, and have been extremely successful doing so. It’s an author and developer’s choice to license all their code under the GPL, and it’s our choice to only promote, accept sponsorship, and accept speaking proposals from people who do so. It’s not a personal thing, and the guidelines apply equally to everyone, and if someone who broke the guidelines in the past stopped tomorrow there would be no hard feelings (it’s not a blackball, which implies permanent exclusion, it’s just part of the social mores of our community).' Does this remind you of anything? Greater good, comply and you'll be OK, free == freedom for everyone, etc. I really want to give Matt and the foundation a benefit of the doubt here, but they are making it very difficult. I followed up with a question about the WP logo, which is bundled in the WP.org download but protected. 'The GPL is a license granted under copyright law, which is separate from a trademark, which WordPress and its logo are. It’s totally allowed by the software license for someone to take the software and make a hosting service, they just have to have their own name for it, like Edublogs. (Some OS communities consider trademark restrictions too much as well, which is why there’s a fork of Firefox called “Iceweasel” included in Debian.) In addition to the guidelines on the Foundation site, having the trademark also gives us a tool to take down phishing sites that target WordPress.org users, or people who set up theme directories at similar-to-WordPress domains where every download includes a malware backdoor. There are many hundreds of these per year.' It seems there are plenty of loopholes when they want them to exist. What I want to know is - what can I do, as a plugin and theme author, to ensure I am properly paid for my work?