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Comment by mingus88 | Hacker News Reader

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

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Aren't all Wordpress plugins GPL due to wordpress being GPL?

No.

Yes.

But in real life, no!

There exist many WordPress plugins that are not GPL-licensed, or plugins that are ostensibly GPL but are merely wrapping things (either code or APIs) that are not GPL, which isn't exactly a compliant use.

Whether we like that is not the question I was answering.

They need to be, but many plugin developers simply break the GPL.

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.

Wordpress does absolutely nothing to enforce this, so their position on the matter is irrelevant.

Commercial plugins are a thing, next.

I understand, but if I create some code that use no wordpress code and only API access and don't ship it with wordpress, they can't enforce a gpl licence for my code.

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.

And then the authors realize this and make the free plugin a nightmare to manage to coax folk into paying for it

That is the entire business model of grafana

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