I come from WordPress so this could be the reason I am surprised, but I have not managed to find any open source premium themes for Ghost so far.
All the open source ones are free ones, and I would love to pay for support and updates as I do with my premium plugins in WordPress but so far all the premium ones I found are not open source.
Do you know of any open source Premium themes to recommend me?
is there a reason I am missing?
Thanks
PS: I do not try to start a discussion about if open source is good or bad for a business, I just wonder if there is something I am missing in ghost that it causing this to happen and trying to find some.
I think I did not explain it right or you miss some of my text.
I said that I found plenty of them free but not many “premium”, meaning that they cost money but also you get updates and support for that price.
All the paid ones are not open source.
I have updated the topic name to add the word paid so people get less confused.
For all Ghost themes the source code is freely available for anyone to modify.
Because the source code is always editable, you can easily find people in this forum who are very capable and happy to be paid to provide ongoing (or one-time) support and updates for any and all of the Ghost themes whether the theme is free or premium.
But being code available does not mean open source.
And the licenses forbidden or limit the ability to hire someone to do changes on most of the cases. At least the licences I have seen are far from open.
But also, I prefer to pay for only open source code. That is why I like ghost.It is a personal preference but I have my reasons for this.
Why no one of the developers that create the paid themes sell them as open source?
Some licenses are restrictive and probably they’re is no way for the developer to find out but I prefer not to buy something and then ignore the licenses.
Do you have an actual example of this? I have seen the discussion here and I while I am no expert in licensing, I am having a hard time imagining what licenses you could mean.
I did not want to name anyone here.
Let’s say that a privative non open source is not where I want to put my money in, considering that this is for a fully open source software.
I of course have examples but this is not where I want to go. If you want to open a new topic with the licenses you use and want to discuss them I am happy to go there an give you my opinion…
But anything not open source (paid or not) is limiting the options to the purchaser.
Okay, this just makes it extremely hard to follow. Like…I get your point. But I cannot answer your question (“why can’t I find open source premium paid themes”), since I have no idea what the exact licensing issues are you’re facing.
I get that you don’t want to name anyone here, but without examples, this has just become a very ambigious and fuzzy topic.
I’d suggest the official ghost themes, which are all MIT licensed, and to buy a Ghost Pro subscription so that you’re financially supporting the creator, but the Ghost Pro team doesn’t regularly update their official themes, and if you want customizations to them, they’re going to direct you to the experts directory, so you’d be paying for hosting, not really for support on the theme itself. I don’t know if that meets your needs.
Same story here: Best Ghost Themes - the themes are GPL licensed, and there’s links to support/sponsor.
I don’t know whether either of these two theme creators are willing to sell you a support plan, but you could ask them.
I suspect you’re not finding anyone selling paid but open source options is because user support is a lot of work, and I suspect it’d be hard to charge enough for support & updates to make a good hourly wage doing it and offer it at a price people would actually buy.
I’m not sure if it fits what you’re looking for, but if what you want is an open source theme and someone who’ll support it, you might hire the support separately. I offer a retainer plan for all things Ghost (including theme support/edits), and there’s lots of other experts in the experts directory who will be glad to help you with any theme (open or closed source) as well. That has the disadvantage of not financially supporting the person who created the theme, but if the theme creator doesn’t want to sell support and you want it, then maybe that’s the way to go.
@jannis It is not that difficult.
Do you have any example of a paid premium theme that is open source?
I have not found any.
So any other theme that is paid and it is not open source, is an example of restrictions I do not want to pay for.
Just check any of those, read the license and you will see they are not open source, therefore they are restrictive.
The topic is simple:
Do you know any example of paid open source themes? If yes, reply with them. If not, do you know why there is none?
Thanks
And no, this does not meet my needs. I want to pay for a theme that will provide paid updates from the same developer that created the theme, but at the same time that it is open source.
There are millions of dollars spent on this business model in WordPress. I think the ghost themes market is probably not mature enough or the market share is not big enough to support those business, but I might be wrong. Or maybe there is something else that I am missing.
Edit adding:
There are themes that offer just pay for updates, not pay for support, so that is also a nice business model and I do not see anyone doing this.
In ghost, I only found lifetime updates with non open source, I am looking for non lifetime updates, but paid updates but an open source license.
I find that to be much better for everyone with the advantage that it is open source, which is what I want to support, not proprietary licenses.
darkpollo "The topic is simple: > Do you know any example of paid open source themes? If yes, reply with them. If not, do you know why there is none? Thanks"
why not provide a couple of examples of wordpress themes that are successfully following this model? It might make it easier for others to understand what you are looking for.
Some quick names, I can share you the links later but Google will redirect you easy to them:
Astra theme, kadence theme, neve theme, generate press are some of the top themes.
If we go into the plugin territory then the list is huge.
Almost everything in WordPress is open source (as it is what the community ask for) and there is a huge amount of businesses with real benefits and income from those plugins and themes.
@hafidzaini
So I disagree that premium + open source is a bad combination.
Source available (aka opening the source) is not the same as open source.
One nice post about open source, licenses (but I do not want to make this post about the benefit or not of the ooen source as business, that WordPress example alone should be enough)
Taking your first example of Astra it’s looks like it’s really two different themes. An incredibly stripped down GPL version and a non-GPL paid version. They don’t offer a GPL+support version of the theme which is what you appear to be asking about which doesn’t help with the confusion around what exactly you’re asking for from the community here.
Ghost theme’s are not really like WordPress themes; in WordPress a theme can replace or add or modify chunks of functionality. Ghost themes are fairly basic styling+content wrappers around the same core functionality. That doesn’t really leave space to have a basic open source version as well as a more fully-featured non-open-source paid version because it would be difficult to add enough value to the paid version of a theme for anyone to use it over the free version.
With Ghost you’re likely going to be limited to free open-source themes with updates along with the possibility of paid-for one-off customisations/support depending on the author, or paid-for themes with updates and support.
You’re as likely to find them by searching as anyone else here is. I don’t think there’s much benefit in going down a rabbit hole of arguing the merits of different licensing and business arrangements.
