Comment by mingus88
13 days ago
This is a very old problem. One of my first commercial programs was a wordpress plugin and as you know, you just distribute the PHP source code in a zip file and there it is
You will never sue your way out of this. Piracy will always exist. GitHub will respond to a legal notice but whack a mole is the game and legal notices cost money
The solution in the WP community at the time was variations of the plugin as a loss leader to get revenue with support or to leverage community visibility into larger contracts for work or hosting the platform for others.
If your business model depends on your code being a secret, JavaScript is not a good play. The business model needs to enhance what the code offers since it’s basically a commodity now
Aren't all Wordpress plugins GPL due to wordpress being GPL?
They need to be, but many plugin developers simply break the GPL.
Sure but developers would still add licensing checks, hosting some dependency offsite, or other obfuscation to try and force people into paying for the plugin
It just doesn’t work. Anyone who wants to will take it. I don’t see this problem going away
I have served many clients with wordpress sites who would much rather pay to license a supported plugin than use a "free" plugin they have to support themselves.
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If they just use the api to create the plugins, no. (It's like Google vs oracle and the java API)
It's the position of wordpress that all themes and plugins are derivative work https://wordpress.org/about/license/
My understanding is because of the way PHP works all plugins are directly interacting with the wordpress code.
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No.
Yes.
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