Its the freeway or the highway. Discussions on the GPL at wptavern.com

I’ve just spent a criminally long amount of time reading through a very long thread on WPTavern.com forum (and writing this post).
It’s started about CForms II being taken off the wordpress repository by it’s author because they didn’t want to have under the GPL licence, it doesn’t end there as it appears to be back and under the GPL again but that’s not what got me scared. What got me scared was the fact that as a plugin developer, I have no power to stop anyone from forking (make a copy and taking it in a new direction) my plugin and doing what the hell they want with it.

Plugin and Theme Licensing Wars

David Peralty, another wordpress theme and plugin developer made some excellent points in the thread about how there should be a mechanism for protecting developers rights when it comes to their (sometimes) pride and joy plugins. He’s made a great post about plugin and theme licensing wars over on his blog which makes me feel better knowing that I’m not the only one who has misgivings about GPL and what it means to what I consider to be my intellectual property.

Ban the whale and save the lentils!

I penned a reply to the forum thread but it turned into a monster so I thought I’d post it here instead (sorry wptavern!) because well, there seems to be a lot of folk over there who subscribe to the , ” if you don’t like it, don’t develop for it then” mentality which doesn’t help me one bit.

Maybe for them (not all of them of course) writing, improving and supporting plugins is an altruistic thing that they do in their spare time from saving whales and they’re happy to keep doing that living on a diet of lentils and free speech but for me, writing plugins pays for my dinner (the bespoke ones I make for clients that I don’t release I mean). It gives me hope that I may one day turn it into a full time income so I wont have to work in a cubicle until I retire or wont have to ask my missus to carry on working 12+ hours a day in a Chinese takeout kitchen.

Baby needs a new pair of shoes!

Not a little baby, but my baby. The plugin I’ve been developing for over 3 years, it’s why this site exists. It’s CommentLuv and I want to make it premium. Well, freemium is more accurate. I am at that point in a wordpress plugin developers journey that I need to justify the time and money I spend on it by either becoming super famous (not likely), turning it in to a money maker or giving it up entirely.

Never gonna give you up..

(yes I did just Rickroll you) I’d really rather not give it up (or let it down ), there’s a huge community that has grown up around the plugin from people like Ileane from Basic Blog Tips who is constantly raving about it and always there to help people with it to Patricia from Lavender Uses who was able to fully utilize the community to help (at least in part) to bring a niche blog from obscurity to be in front of many eyes and now enjoys a very active comment section of her posts.

You’ve got massive blogs like The SITS Girls who are all about community and helping and giving a regular Joes (Janes?) exposure by taking advantage of their high traffic to highlight them and give them a traffic boost. So many new commentluv installers come via SITS I can tell you!

They’ll never take away our freedom!

That is not to say there wont be a free version any more. That’s where the

freemium business model comes in. You get the free version that performs as the plugin you all know and love does now (actually, even better) and for those that want the extra special, super duper version with priority support and an obligation from me to help in a timely manner when it doesn’t work and a guarantee that I’ll keep updating it to work with every updated version of WordPress, there’ll be the premium version which I hope that you’ll one day consider getting.

Forum blog post

This is what was to be my forum reply before I yoinked it for here..

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I hear,
“well of course anyone copy the code and resell it, it’s GPL and it’s perfectly legal”
“yes but the ‘community’ would not support them and no one would download it”

oh yes they will! maybe someone doesn’t know that the one they’re downloading is not the original. Maybe they do and just don’t care? I know a number of people (well, at least 2 :-P) who create sites commercially for clients, they always use wordpress and a range of plugins. Some premium, some from the repository. They make their living from doing this and they have no qualms whatsoever from downloading a ‘free’ version of a ‘premium’ plugin. “it’s GPL, there’s nothing they can do” they say.

I’m not talking big commercial many staff operations here, I’m on about single Joes who discovered they have a talent for building sites using other peoples work and decided to monetize it.

I’ve seen people offer wpmu dev plugins all zipped up for a fiver advertising on adwords. Do you think they care that they’ll lose respect in the ‘community’? pah, they don’t care, they just got some dollars to pay for their kids new shoes! What about the user who buys that package? do you think they care that they’re not supporting the original author? have you seen what those guys charge? haha, of course not! a fiver? .. yoink! 😉

That’s what scares me about the GPL requirements, I’m not knowledgeable in the law enough to read it and understand it so I rely on threads like this and when I see talk of ‘the cheeky git, lets someone else fork it and take credit for his probably months of original work because, well, how dare he not give it away for free forever!’ it scares the hell out of me!

What if I spend 3 years building a plugin from scratch, listen to users, spend thousands on hosting and supporting and learning and spend time away from family and friends working on improvements. Do I not have any power if someone with a successful business and/or plenty of money and/or venture capitalist friends decides that my support is not up to scratch or the design of the settings page sucks and forks it, charges for it and because of the above, has the ability/resources to provide the support that so many on this thread claim that users wouldn’t get if they didn’t get the plugin from the original author?

Is there mechanism for me to whack him with a, “hey dude, that’s my sh*t right there and you stole it, now you need to pay” ?

I know it’s supposed to be GPL automatically when you release a plugin and I know that “if you don’t like they way wordpress does it, don’t develop for it” but, what if I don’t have experience of other systems so I have no choice?

What are we saying here? ‘come and develop for an awesome system but if you start trying to make money from it, we wont help you when someone copies your work, hell, we’ll even encourage people to make versions of your stuff and give it away for free’ (paraphrase of Matt there over his call to people to make free version of wpmu premiums plugins).

There really should be a system in place to not only help developers but also to protect them. Their work is what makes wordpress so powerful and ubiquitous as not only a blog platform but also increasingly as a CMS.

Is there a better way?