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Comment by jacooper | Hacker News Reader

It's unfortunate that WordPress.org has to be replaced, it requiring plugins to be gplv2 licensed has forced the ecosystem be almost fully open source.

Doubt this is going to be the case if FAIR takes over.

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FAIR plugin is gplv2. They will continue to use the core of Wordpress, also gplv2.

Can you explain how this would allow any other license than gplv2 for the plugins?

I think what the parent is saying is:

WordPress.org demands that plugins they host are GPL.

FAIR is a protocol that allows access to additional repositories. These other repositories may not have this same demand.

and what I am saying is: wordpress core is gplv2. A plugin is therefore under gplv2 per the definition of the gplv2 of derivative work.

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/are-wordpress-plugins-au...

https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/406337/does-wo...

No, it must be according to the core‘s license, but if the plugin author doesn‘t license it as GPLv2, it isn‘t.

The plugin‘s author breaches the core‘s license, but that doesn‘t make the plugin GPLv2 by itself.

Has that ever actually been tested though? Ultimately, to work, a plugin only needs to call a handful of WP functions, if at all -- hard to argue it's a derivative work, just because it can be used _with_ WP. Is grep a derivative work of bash because you can use bash to execute grep?

Something like the following would be a valid plugin, but it doesn't directly or indirectly use _any_ code by WP. It's only executed by WP. I don't believe that it would be considered a derivative work of WP, because that file would happily run without WP as well.

<?php /* Plugin Name: My Plugin Version: 0.1 */

if($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] === "/my-url") { // do something interesting, use curl to fetch some content }

I've always been confused by this assertion, too. It's often the justification for privacy of paid plugins, too.

In addition to your example, I can imagine a very defensible scenario where a plugin is "standalone" with a shim layer to connect to WordPress (and maybe other CMSes, too).

Yeah, the infectious nature can hardly infect a third party software, even if the shim itself would be infected.

The one case I just remembered where it was remotely challenged was Thesis [1], but Automattic chose to throw money into bullying the challenger rather than going after the alleged license violation.

[1] https://wptavern.com/mullenweg-and-pearson-square-off-on-pat...

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