Brian Gardner, the author and creator of the very popular Revolution WordPress premium themes, has announced that he will be releasing all future Revolution themes as open source under the GPL License and in accordance with WordPress standards. This change is set to take effect on Saturday, November 1st.

Explaining why he has decided to go open source, Brian says:

Jason Schuller, who runs WP Elements as well as created the Featured Content Gallery plugin, will be teaming up with me on the upcoming Revolution project. His creativity and resources will be a huge asset to Revolution and the community. He and I will both be developing themes, and all of them will be made available on the upcoming site. He also has plans to develop more plugins, which will all be housed on the site as well.
Many of you know that a few weeks ago, Jason flew out here to Chicago so we could discuss some things. Well obviously it was all about working together, and our desire to build something in the WordPress community that would be really big. The reason for the delay in our announcement was a result of something I threw out there to him – only hours before he was to fly back to Seattle. “Hey man, what if we released all of our themes open source?” Thus the delay…
Why the change of heart?
This one is really simple – more than anything, Jason and I want to develop a resource and community that is perfectly aligned with WordPress. Both he and I have been fortunate enough to leave our day jobs within the past year and have developed our own media companies. None of that would have been possible without the existence of WordPress, which is solely built and supported by the open source community.
It only seems fair that we abandon our current premium theme models, and begin a new way of doing business. I contacted Matt and Toni to see if they would be gracious enough to carve out some time to meet with us, so we could ensure that our business model was in compliance with standards set forth by the authors of the GPL license as well as with WordPress.