[wp-forums] Themes/Templates Forum: Commercial Themes

[Mika A. Epstein]

On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 09:22:34 -0500, Chip Bennett wrote:
> I'm sure this has been brought up before, but is there a good way to 
> handle
> the ad nauseum requests for support for commercial Themes?
>
> Right now, when I run across them (which is often, as I spend 90% of 
> my
> forum time in Themes/Templates), I just post a comment that we cannot
> provide support for commercial Themes, and to consult the support 
> offerings
> of the Theme developer.
>
> Would a "commercial" tag be helpful, or useless? I'd love to see such 
> topics
> closed on-sight, to discourage support requests for commercial Themes 
> - but
> obviously that's not my call. :)

A 'commercial' tag sounds like a nice thing :)

Generally I treat 'commercial' anything (themes or plugins) the same 
way, since I think that people deserve to make a living off this, and I 
feel when I buy a product that's GPL, what I'm buying is SUPPORT and not 
the product.

My Boilerplate: "You're using a commercial [whatever] which has pay-for 
support.  As these guys need to make a living too, you really should 
contact them directly for support."

Closing the posts ... well see, even though it's commercial, it's 
totally GPL for me to buy a plugin and give it to you. So the fact that 
YOU didn't buy it doesn't make it 'wrong,' just that the polite thing to 
do is pay up for support.  Good stewardship ;)  Obviously I'm pretty 
okay with them asking, but not always in helping. Sometimes the help is 
as simple as 'You need to edit the CSS to...' but when it gets down to 
nitty gritty theme-specific admin panels...

-- 
Mika A Epstein (aka Ipstenu)
http://ipstenu.org