GPL license requirements for paid plugins?

[barbara schendel]

Hey all, 

This is sort of a "legal" question about plugins -- Are WordPress plugins which are sold and distributed by third parties (NOT through the WP repo) required to hold to all parts of the GPL rules? 

For example, if you sell & license a premium plugin on your own site, and a user's license expires, is it allowed to have the plugin stop working? 

Thank you!

~barbara~

[Eric Celeste]

Barbara,

I don’t think that GPL requires a creator to keep their plugin “working” even after a license has expired. All GPL really requires is that the code of the plugin be available to the user of the plugin.

In WordPress, this requirement is pretty much always met for plugins, which are shared as source code and installed on your WP installation. Even if the plugin expires, you are welcome to go to your filesystem and review the code, or even rewrite it.

That said, there are ways for plugin authors to compile or obscure portions of their code so that the user really cannot review them. In those cases, I think GPL would require that the uncompiled version of the code be somewhere available to the user of the code. I have seen plugins that do not really take that to heart.

Also, I am not a lawyer nor an expert in GPL. Also, not all plugins are licensed via GPL (mine, for example, are usually distributed under the MIT license). So take all I say here with a large grain of salt!

...Eric

Eric Celeste / e...@clst.org / 651-323-2009

[Nick Ciske]

IANAL but yes, all plugins that are installed into WordPress must be GPL or GPL compatible as WordPress is GPL and the plugins become part of WordPress thus must be compatible with the GPL license WP is under. GPL say that once you have the code, you can run it in perpetuity but that there is never any guarantee it’ll work, ever ;-)

That is why almost all plugins don’t stop working — just support & updates stop when you stop paying, why GPL “clubs” and nulled plugins exist, and why you’ll find some paid plugins on Github with different names (as copyright protection is the only real way to fight infringement).

This is also why you’ll see “enabler” plugins that connect to a SASS as that allows the owner to turn off the SASS side when payment stops.

That said, there’s nothing short of a lawsuit that is going to force compliance here - the only real power WP had was to ban those people from WordCamps / sponsorship opportunities.

Nick Ciske  CTO/CISO
nick....@luminfire.com   |   612-564-1626 x702
Custom technology solutions that make businesses more effective, productive, and profitable.

[barbara schendel]

Very helpful. Thanks guys.