[wp-hackers] A question about donation link

[Mike Schinkel]

On Jan 15, 2010, at 2:32 PM, Jordi Canals wrote:
> One of the questions asked here is about removing the authoring attribution
> on a theme page footer. Asked that to the Free Software Foundation and the
> answer is that deleting the theme author attribution from the theme page
> footer violates the GPL license. Exactly, violates the section 2c of GPLv2
> and sections 5d and 7 for GPLv3.

Although IANAL I think you are incorrectly interpreting the license.   

I believe that you *can* remove the copyright notices from any part of the output that the theme or plugin generates. What you cannot do is remove the copyright notice from the *source code* itself.

Here is that interpretation related to GPL-licensed Joomla:

http://opensourcematters.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55

Of course if there is an IP lawyer on the list maybe he or she could clarify?

-Mike