Chip Bennett

This, naturally, raises the question as to how the commercial theme/plugin sites are different.

Commercial Theme/Plugin shops are different in that they are not bound by wordpress.org policy and guidelines. That means that you could find commercial shops distributing Themes/Plugins under non-GPL-compatible licenses, or bundling non-GPL-compatible resources with their distributed Themes/Plugins.

If anything which is made from wordpress must be GPL, what stops people from paying for a theme on a commercial site, then simply uploading to wp.org for free?

Policy and guidelines. While it’s simply not feasible to stop any and all attempts, the Theme Review Team would not accept any submission known to be a commercial Theme, or otherwise not owned by the person attempting to submit the Theme. (And it does happen, from time to time.)

That is where my confusion comes in. In reading the GPL FAQ, I can’t see anything which allows people to prevent others from redistributing GPL works (including themes/plugins), for free.

Indeed, no such restriction exists in the GPL. It is fully within the terms of the license to obtain a free Theme or purchase a commercial Theme, and then redistribute that Theme for free or for cost.

Why don’t we see premium themes/plugins or slightly modified versions of them on wp.org? Is it a wp.org policy thing or is there a GPL loophole I’m not seeing?

Exactly: it is wordpress.org policy.

(Note: you’ll find plenty of premium Themes on wordpress.org; what you won’t find are commercial Themes. Not all commercial Themes are premium, and not all premium Themes are commercial. I would put the overall code quality of the Themes hosted in the official Theme directory up against the overall code quality of just about any commercial Theme shop.)

Hi @tubaplayer, you should post your question directly in the forum for the Contango Theme:
http://wordpress.org/support/theme/contango

Taken care of. I’ve suspended PressWork. Please let me know if/when the issue is resolved.

In a Child Theme functions.php file (or in a site functionality Plugin), add the following:

remove_action( 'contango_footer', 'contango_footer_init' );

That will remove the current footer credit.

You’ll also lose the copyright information, including your Theme setting. To restore it, add the following in the same place as above:

add_action( 'contango_footer', 'custom_contango_footer' );
function custom_contango_footer() {
	$contango_options = contango_get_settings();	

	/** Footer Copyright Logic */
	$contango_copyright_code = '&copy; Copyright '. date( 'Y' ) .' - <a href="'. esc_url( home_url( '/' ) ) .'">'. get_bloginfo( 'name' ) .'</a>';
	if( $contango_options['contango_copyright_control'] == 1 ) {

		$contango_copyright_code = '&nbsp;';
		if( ! empty( $contango_options['contango_copyright'] ) ) {
			$contango_copyright_code = wp_specialchars_decode( $contango_options['contango_copyright'], ENT_QUOTES );
		}

	}
}