New Wordpress Theme, and how dumb is this?

So I transformed my site from a money maker to a personal blog, yea go figure! After searching through hundreds and hundreds of themes I finally found one I liked, Hemingway. So I installed and began messing around with it, now I am a valid semantic freak so when I noticed there were errors and warnings on the page I hit the code and started fixing them. BTW, if you use this theme a major error is found in the designby() function, it seems that the author tried to mask the website link, so you couldn’t search by it easily, using concatenation the problem of course is that he has an extra period (.) in his code which does not validate. The best idea is to remove the concatenation.

Now if that was not enough while trudging through the code I noticed in the header.php file the author has a php function to look for the designby() function and if it does not find it, it does not display the header. I find this very disturbing because he is forcing you to include his link, specially if you do not know the correct things to delete. Why do people do this? Look if someone really wants to steal your code they are going to get it, you simply can not protect against that except to not release the code at all. I mean I could even pull the design off your page if I want too. It’s just bad. What’s even worse is if you look in the footer.php page the author says

// You are not required to keep this link back to Warpspire, but if you wouldn’t mind, leaving it in would make my day.

Well if I am not required then why would you even waste the time of putting in a mechanism to try and divert me from removing your link? It’s just plain wrong.

As you notice I still have the link because I have no problems giving credit where credit is due, but I do dislike someone trying to “force” something on me, especially when they make a comment like the one quoted above. I’m getting off my soapbox now.