Ah, the "witch hunt" begins again. We took down all the templates. The funny thing is NO ONE wanted any of them. We always end up creating custome templates from scratch. While we dont list all of the template creators, when showing clients possibilities we do leave the authors name, website, etc in the template so clients can see who the author was. I noticed on your site that you sell custom made templates; however, it is very confusing for people when you purchase a temlate so that it is removed from your site (which I assume means you will not sell it to anyone else, but it is not directly stated on your site), kinda makes it seem as if no one else can purchase that template. What happens when someone payed you a smaller price to use it and then someone else buys it from you. That is extremely misleading. You should have listed on your site how many people have purchased each template. Beyond that, if you use open source tools to create you template then you should credit those authors for without them you would not be able to supply templates to people.
If you are releasing templates to the world, then you have no right to tell people how/when/where to use those templates.
I think may find that you are violating the same principals that you feel we are violating. I personally give to several of the open source projects out there. As we grow, I will continue to donate, time and money to those projects and more. I have also been around the open source for quite some time. I dont think Linus, BSD, Sendmail, Apache, etc authors complain about how their products are used by the commercial industry. So why should you? Are you better than everyone else?
Also we recieved you bashing email, and appreciate it very much. I will be kind enough to post it to the forum later today with direct responses.
I think maybe you should start giving credit where credit is do on your site as well. I think you not only list mambo, but mysql, apache, any apache modules that your using, the os, email, etc...make sure that you dont leave anyone out because they might get their feelings hurt....I think you will find that many times it is better to NOT list everyone so that you dont forget someone that it is to forget someone.
People are quicker to bash people, rather than ask questions to find answer. You have made a lot of assumptions, in this post and your email. Maybe you should look at how you do business and how to make things better than giving someone else a hard time.
For everyone once again we do NOT charge for the actual templates. But knowing that people will rarely want excactly what is on a template, we have allocated various prices to each, based on previous experience with clients in our area. Now that being said, we have REMOVED all the templates from our site...we have not had ONE client who liked any of the templates. I have even walked clients through several of the Mambo sites to show other templates...most clients want custom looks and feels....there is the kicker, we have quickly discovered that MOST people dont want a portal look and feel...clients want a website look and feel like they want. The normally do not want something that looks like what someone else already has. So most of our clients sites, use Mambo, but most people would have no idea that it is actually Mambo. We can convert almost any look and feel that someone already has or wants into a template that will work with Mambo.
The is the last time, I will post on this issue. If you guys have problems I suggest that you look at the things that you are doing before casting the first stone. And make sure that you are not living in a glass house.
Just my $0.02.
