Last year Revolution Themes announced with some fanfare that they would be going ‘open source’, which means they would no longer charge any money for future theme releases. Obviously the ones that had already been made would not be free to make it fair to the people who had already paid for them.
A handful of new themes were released for free and a few of us downloaded them.
Then just before Christmas the free download offer was withdrawn and a new offer of buying all the themes for $159.95 was put in its place. There was never any official announcement of why they abandoned their open source promise.
Fast forward a couple of weeks into January 2009 and the price of $159.95 has been increased to $199.95. Again there has been no official or unofficial announcement of why this increase has been implemented.
Now, most people will argue that Brian Gardner and his team can do whatever the hell they like with their own creation, and to a point they are correct, but it does not end there.
Anyone asking about why the themes are no longer free will not only have their posts removed from the forum and the blog, but are then banned from posting again. I should know because it happened to me.
I use two of his themes for two of my blogs and needed some help on a problem between his themes and a plugin. I’d received the solution from the forum before, but could not find it, so I posted asking for the solution.
The next day I checked and saw that not only has my post been removed but I have been banned from using the forum.
The only reason I can come up with is because I downloaded the two themes legally when they were free and did not delete them now that people have to pay for them. I’m waiting for someone connected with Revolution2 to demand I take the theme down.
Don’t get me wrong, they do fantastic themes and if they want to sell them then that is up to them & the people willing to buy them, but I do not agree that they should be so heavy-handed with people who enquire why they went back on their open source promise so quickly.
I wonder if they can legally force me to take down the themes I downloaded from their site for free?
Image by Peter Timmerhues from Pixabay