AutoDesk is an enormous company. Publicly traded on the Nasdaq, they have a market cap just under $12 Billion. You may have heard of AutoCAD, the thirty year old drafting software that’s an absolute titan in a broad range of industries.
And they’ve just acquired Creative Market, a digital marketplace that’s gotten a lot of attention in the WordPress world the last couple of years.
Creative Market products
Creative Market boasts more than 25,000 products from over 3,000 shops, and nearly 300,000 members.
Like Envato and Mojo Themes (acquired last year by EIG — the company behind HostGator, Bluehost, and dozens of others), Creative Market sells much more than just WordPress themes. They’ve gained a great deal of traction as a marketplace that sells modern and attractive non-theme assets such as graphics, fonts, and brushes.
According the the acquisition announcement, Creative Market founders were impressed by AutoDesk’s vision:
Can this champion of design software extend its legacy to empower designers and makers of all levels? We believe the answer is “yes” so much that we’ve decided to join them and to continue building this community and our tools and marketplace as part of the Autodesk Consumer Group.
Creative Market is a team of 12, and the three co-founders will all move to AutoDesk’s corporate headquarters in San Francisco.
Theme marketplaces and the GPL
Inevitably, when talking about Creative Market and WordPress, I must also talk about Envato and the GPL.
Creative Market really got on my radar in February of 2013 when they announced that they were going 100% GPL for their WordPress themes. The change was right on the heels of a huge debate that started thanks to Jake Caputo blogging about being “blackballed” from speaking at WordCamps due to being a ThemeForest author.
Creative Market on WordPress.org
That whole debate was resolved when Envato opened a 100% GPL licensing option, but before they did, Matt Mullenweg made a promise that any marketplace that was 100% GPL would be featured on the WordPress.org home page, which he followed up on when Creative Market made the announcement.
And so the WordPress.org homepage had a banner ad for Creative Market, and later Mojo Themes as well, for almost a year. From what I can tell on Archive.org, it was removed on January 3rd, 2014 and replaced with a link to a landing page for the WordPress Swag store.
The ecosystem of businesses that have been built around WordPress is huge, but shallow. Few companies are both large (relatively speaking) and central to a broad WordPress community. With 60+ employees, some of which are very well-known WordPress developers, 
I had the pleasure of being a guest on 
