Brian Gardner has decided that the premium WordPress theme, Revolution, won’t be sold as of October 31, 2008. A new set of themes will be released instead, GPL’d and free to download. The move has been applauded by Matt Mullenweg, head honcho of the WordPress project. We covered this yesterday, but I figured it would be interesting to talk to Brian about it as well.

Moving the Revolution Theme to another level, with free GPL’d themes, is very interesting for sure. If I was a cynic I would be wondering if this is a move due to the competition in the premium themes market right now, and the fact that sales of the Revolution Theme might have panned out?

This is absolutely not true – in fact, sales have been as steady as ever. My theory is that the amount of people who were purchasing premium themes grew, so the market in general was increasing. There wasn’t a reduction in % split in the market for premium designers, it probably stayed the same, just more people buying them.

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Brian Gardner’s Revolution Theme is one of the more successful premium WordPress themes out there. While I have no idea how many licenses have been sold, the praise and amount of websites running it is testament enough.

No more, says Brian on his blog:

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.

I didn’t see that one coming, but it does makes sense. The whole idea with the premium themes model is that you’ll have a small number of sites running the same design, more or less, and not thousands of look-a-likes, as you might have should you just download a popular theme. Wanting to protect your users makes sense. But there is more. read more