Comments on: WordPress Plugin and Theme GPL Misconceptions, Misinformation, and Perspective

By: 91jianfei

91jianfei — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:54:34 +0000

Can plugins charge and still be GPL?

By: Dunia

Dunia — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:43:45 +0000

Great articl e with complete and detail explanation. Thank you

By: Red

Red — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:58:55 +0000

Thanks for taking the time to make a stand on this.
I see a pefect sense in what you wrote and it makes me angry to find people twisting the GPL.
I use some of your plugin in most of my sites and I enjoy them, especially All in One SEO. I moved to headspace2 on a test site only to find some fundamental issues and move back to All in One SEO.

Thanks for your continues contribution to the WordPress community.

Keep up the good work!!
Red
.-= Red´s last blog ..Steve is back: over 1m Apple iPhone 3GS sold =-.

By: Andrei Belogortseff

Andrei Belogortseff — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 20:26:20 +0000

Michael, if you have not seen this yet, you may want to take a look at the following legal analysis of the “plugins must be GPL’d” claim:

http://www.law.washington.edu/lct/swp/Law/derivative.html

It’s a long article but it’s well worth the read.
.-= Andrei Belogortseff´s last blog ..Getting online in New Zealand =-.

By: Dan Milward

Dan Milward — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:07:39 +0000

Hey Chaps. What a fascinating read!! Kevin I've had an idea. Here is my plan. Why don't you do what other people do (the real WordPress Rockstars) and contribute this so called list of acceptable GPL models back to the community. We know you can write well and it seems like you have a lot of time on your hands and it certainly seems as though you've certainly done your research. I don't think its a big ask especially since people like Matt, Michael and Brian are busy working on their respective projects. It seems to me like you could have written this "list of acceptable business models" 10 times over in the time that it has taken you to personally retort to each of these comments. What a huge amount of time you must have spent on this, I hope you havent lost any sleep over it. Because time is short you should start as soon as possible and when you're finished you could either sell it online using the WP e-Commerce Plugin or you could except online donations. If you choose the later and if Michael chips in $10 I'll chip in $10 too. On a more serious note I'm going to talk about our business model at the UK WordCamp coming up soon. .-= Dan Milward´s last blog ..simpleCart + thematic (weekend) challenge =-.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:45:37 +0000

Matt, Thanks you for your comment. I just wanted to take a definitive stand on the issues once and for all.
Hopefully http://wordpress.org/development/2009/07/themes-are-gpl-too/ will also help put some of these silly debates about the GPLness of themes/plugins to rest, and hopefully http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/commercial/ will do the same for those who keep insisting that Automattic has some sort of objection to people making money through WordPress related ventures.

By: Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:33:36 +0000

Thanks for taking an even-handed look at this, one of the best articles I’ve read on the whole issue in a while.

By: Katy

Katy — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:14:33 +0000

Pretty nice post. I just found your site and wanted to say
that I have really liked reading your blog posts. In any case
I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you post again soon!

By: Andreas Nurbo

Andreas Nurbo — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:35:39 +0000

If you check Matts response to my paid service theme question it also comes down to how things are to the end user. The theme should not complicate things for the end user or as Matt put it be user-hostile.

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:01:16 +0000

Barry,
Thank you for commenting. To answer your question, a WordPress theme or plugin must be GPL compliant. Since Automattic/Matt owns wordpress.org, they can also allow whatever they want there. They’ve decided that what they want are themes that people would like to share with the community. What they don’t want is someone to make a theme as bait to lure people to their site which has non-GPL themes, or just so that they can advertise sponsored links on the theme. Nobody is perfect, and during the manual cleansing there were likely some legitimate themes that fell through the cracks and got removed.