Now the cat is out of the bag as Brian Gardner officially announced earlier today that Revolution Themes would go open source, meaning all themes would be released under a GPL license and in compliance with WordPress standards.

What happens to the previously released Revolution themes?

As of 12:00 midnight, Friday October 31st, the themes that are currently available at the Revolution theme site will no longer be available. Ever. This was a decision that I made in order to protect the integrity of the current themes and the conditions under which they were released. Over the past year I have built a community of Revolution users, and to freely offer up those themes would be completely unfair to them. My community matters to me, and this is how I have chosen to handle current themes.

If you’re a current customer and Revolution theme user, you don’t have to be worried because:

I do want to point out, as promised to users who’ve previously purchased the current Revolution themes, that there will be a section in the new support forum where we will continue to support those themes.

On November 1st, the Revolution Theme site will be relaunched with completely new themes that will all be released under the GPL license, meaning anyone can download it for FREE. For those who need support, need more options or wish to have a customized version of the theme, these services/features are available for a certain fee.

In this project, Brian has teamed up with Jason Schuller author of WP Elements and creator of the Massive News, TV. Elements, Video Elements WordPress themes. Prior to the official announcement of this project, Brian and Jason met up with Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider of Auttomatic to discuss this project and to make sure that the project would be in compliance with the GPL license and WordPress standards. The new Revolution project would be developed and supported by Brian and Jason but they aren’t in any way partnering with WordPress or are being employed by Automattic.

Brian Gardner has started another revolution in the premium themes industry. The first time he did it was when he released the Revolution theme that “revolutionized” and paved the way for premium themes today. With this new Revolution project that will release open source premium themes, the Revolution themes would definitely have a wider market or user base and more WordPress users will have the opportunity to use premium themes especially those who don’t have the budget to purchase one. For folks like me who have know HTML/CSS or know how to tweak WordPress themes, this is definitely good news coz we can just download these themes and customize it ourselves.

It would be interesting to see/know what would be the reaction of current Revolution theme customers, other premium theme authors/vendors as well as the effect of this “revolution” on the WordPress premium theme industry.

If you’re a current Revolution user, what was your reaction when you first heard/read about this? To other WordPress users, what do you think about Revolution Themes going open source? Please share your thoughts and thanks for your time!