The Times are a-Changin’

As WordPress emerged the dominant self-hosted blogging platform of perhaps 2 years ago a growing ecosystem of sites and services sprung up around WordPress.org including resources websites, premium WordPress themes and other associated services (and yes, that was a plug for Daniel who used to also write for gHacks).

Although no official objections where ever made to the companies and individuals selling services like premium WordPress themes I believe there was always a little controversy. Some free software proponents feel the effort put into these kinds of services would do better being put back into the whole WordPress community so everyone benefits seeing as the community was the ones who made this kind of business possible.

Personally I think these services have done nothing but good for the WP community. Better premium themes has inspired free theme creators to release better themes and to give credit where its due, most premium authors also release their themes for free in either basic version, separate complete releases or whenever they retire an older theme.

Interestingly though one of the biggest premium theme creators, Revolution themes, have decided that from now on they are changing their business model and releasing their themes for free.

In a move that would make any free software proponent proud they are instead betting on making their money through service subscriptions which you can purchase for several hundred dollars.

Their latest release of themes, Revolution 2, is a fantastic set of free themes and if you use WordPress for your blog I really recommend checking them out.

Update: Revolution 2 is no longer available. It is not clear where the theme went and why it is no longer available anymore. There are however alternative web services available that enable you to get new themes for free or by paying for them.

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