

Number 10’s new website, from our beloved government who are such strong users and supporters of Open Source Software [NOT], is running on WordPress. This isn’t actually big news now. There’s plenty of comment about that on the web via Google.

Well, that’s OK I guess. At last they are starting to grok OSS perhaps, although I’m rather inclined to actually surmise that they [#10] don’t even know what WordPress is. They just bought a website…

Anyway, quite a nice site layout don’t you think? I wonder who designed their site?

Looking at the html source, we see that the stylesheets are in a directory called networker-10/ and many of the images are in a subdirectory called images/ .







Firstly, see the bit above where it says ? Usually, in there, that line reads: where the X.X.X is the version of WordPress the site is running.

So they’ve removed changed that then. I wonder if they are trying to conceal the fact they are using WP? Not a very useful trick though is it? Having a directory tree called /wp-content/themes/... is a bit of a giveaway if you ask me.

Now then, if you visit Antbag.com and look at some of the themes they have created, there’s one on there called “Networker”. Here’s the demo page http://antbag.com/demo/index.php?wptheme=NetWorker

Let’s look at the top few lines of the html source for this theme:







They look quite similar don’t they? The directory structure is identical and the top-level theme directory is called networker-10 . Amazing…

The Networker theme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. Which you can read all about here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I can only assume that Number 10 have requested, and received, permission of the author to remove all traces of this license and attribution from their WordPress site. I have left a “contact us message” at the author’s website to see if this is the case…

[Update] Anthony Baggett, the theme’s author, has just confirmed that No 10 have not requested that the attribution be removed. That’s not playing fair by my book.

[Update 2] Seems like I am not the only one to have noticed this. A bit more digging has thrown up the following sites also commenting on #10’s cock-up. One is also suggesting it cost Â£100k. Not bad for a ripped off theme running on an Open Source blogging engine… Links below]

http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2008/08/16/prime-ministers-website-breaks-copyright-law/

http://community.livejournal.com/theyorkshergob/123043.html

http://www.mikerouse.net/2008/08/15/10-downing-street-wordpress-website-knock-off-and-rip-off/

http://dizzythinks.net/2008/08/downing-street-claims-crown-copyright.html

Tags: #10, Government, Open Source, UK, Wordpress