Business ethics?
I just noticed that the design competition I mentioned in my last post is sponsored by a website that sells open source templates as "unique designs" for hundreds of U.S. dollars. In other words, someone can pay a lot of money for what he thinks is a "unique design" - but what he really gets is a slightly modified open source template which may already be used on thousands of websites. For example, andreas07 is sold as "unique" for $445, while andreas01 is sold for $325. If you don't want to pay for these "unique" templates, you can register for a $59.95 membership and download as many templates as you want to during one year.
While it is indeed perfectly OK (meaning "not nice, but also not illegal") to delete the credits and re-distribute templates on the commercial market, it is really ugly to fool people into paying hundreds of dollars to get something that they could just as well get for free. And calling the designs "unique" is nothing but a lie, and this completely crushes all respect I have for this website. They also don't answer my e-mails, so I assume that they don't mind that I write about their lack of business ethics.
But they are obviously sponsoring the open source community through OWD, so I've asked for more information in order to understand what this is all about. Once I know more I'll decide what to do next.
Until then, I recommend everyone who want "premium templates" to not click the banner on OWD. Download the free templates instead! If you still need "premium templates" (which I rather referr to as "commercial templates" since the price is the main difference), then check out the templates from 4Templates. Those are manually coded by professional designers, and sold by a serious company with good business ethics.
Edit: This is completely insane! Look at these rules, taken from the license information on the mentioned website:
- "You may not sell/giveaway our templates to 3rd parties."
- "You may not claim that you designed our templates."
- "You may not include/bundle our templates within your products and sell them."
- "You may not distribute our template after you have performed modifications on it, UNLESS all images and design objects are replaced and the template looks drastically different from the original template. The images we use are licensed and if you use them without obtaining a proper license you will be liable for damages and copyright infringement."
And on the same page, the following warning is posted:
"IMPORTANT WARNING - All our template(s) and digital work(s) have been filed with the US, UK and Australian Copyright Office. If you misuse or distribute our digital works without prior written consent from us, we will seek damages and you will be prosecuted."
This is just… Insane…
Edit 2: Leaving the topic for now to let other people do their thing. I've been forced to explain myself over and over again, since many have missed what the main problem really is. But a lot of people have learned the truth about these "unique" templates, and that is good. Now I just hope that the website owners go through their templates and make sure that they don't keep the false marketing and the direct lies on their site. That is the only reasonable thing to do if they want to show some kind of good spirit. But I won't waste any energy on this for now, I still have a lot of work to catch up with…
Comment from pat
Time: September 13, 2006, 3:53
After reading I decided to check it out and found a few of my templates up there too. Business ethics indeed…