In case you've missed the latest happenings in the WordPress community, Marco Tabini is here to catch you up. The issue? Licensing of themes for WordPress.

The WordPress community is abuzz with news that the WP Foundation has essentially gone to war with the makers of the Thesis WP theme. The substance of the argument, as I understand it, is that the makers of WordPress claim that themes, since they rely on WP's GPL'ed code to run, must be covered by the GPL as well because they are derivative works. Thesis, on the other hand, is distributed under a commercial license, therefore violating this tenet.

Marco talks about all of the legal implications of the issue and some of the stances each side has taken - WordPress saying that since the code has a foundation on it, it must be covered and the themers saying that's ridiculous. As Marco points out, however, is that the opinions of non-legal professionals doesn't really matter. What matters is what would hold up if this issue were ever pressed into a legal arena. He even includes some suggestions he wishes the WPF would take to heart including to just back off.

According to this post from the Eclipse site (mailing list), the PHPIDE code for Zend's project is undergoing a legal review and is awaiting a "legal authorization code".

There's not much more information than that in the main post, but several of the commentators are wondering if this will cause a delay for the next code release, if it will affect the Zend Debugger as well, and if it was an expected legal review.

There's no response yet from Guy Harpaz, the original poster of the thread, but we'll keep you updated.