Why WordPress Themes are Derivative of WordPress

"There are many aspects to the ongoing WordPress vs. Thesis brouhaha. Things like respect, copyright, freedom, GPL, ownership. There is no doubt that Thesis lifted lines of code, and even whole sections of code, directly from WordPress. The Thesis developer who did some of the lifting confessed to it (much to his credit).

"Some people have changed their opinion on the matter when they learned of that wholesale code copying. That is, they changed their mind about Thesis specifically. But those revelations happened later in the fray, after Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg's discussion on Mixergy about the matter. It is the position of the WordPress core developers that themes cannot be considered wholly original creations even when they don't copy large sections of code in from WordPress. Theme code necessarily derives from WordPress and thus must be licensed under the GPL if it is distributed."

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