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We are all familiar with software licenses that place broad restrictions on what the customer can do (“you may not decompile, reverse-engineer, benchmark, or pl

by sethg 17y ago

We are all familiar with software licenses that place broad restrictions on what the customer can do (“you may not decompile, reverse-engineer, benchmark, or play FrisbeeⓇ with this Software...”), but if those restrictions have any legal effect at all, it is only because the license is in the form of a contract (“by clicking ‘I ACCEPT’ you agree to all the terms of this License...”) between the software vendor and the customer. The GPL is, by design, a license rather than a contract, and therefore it cannot forbid any action that copyright law permits. If indeed a WordPress premium theme is not a “derivative work” within the meaning of copyright law, then the GPL cannot touch it, regardless of the GPL author’s intent.

bricestacey 17y ago
I should preface this that I don't really know much about copyright law. The sticky point to me is that you could write WP themes as binaries called using fork/exec. So in essence, the developer's choice to use WP function calls and variables effectively makes it a derivate work, at least in my opinion. I'm not a big fan of this, though it makes the most sense in my mind (at least with my opinion mostly biased by the GPL). I remember reading Dries, the found of Drupal, effectively claiming that all Drupal modules were GPL'ed and not liking it so much that I have altered my plans for future Drupal modules (all the better for me, my intellectual property will not be open for all to witness as I intend a more hosted solution which I can charge a higher premium for). Ultimately, I feel like crusades by open source projects (WordPress, Drupal, etc) to GPL their modules will backfire and create a more restrictive, hosted component to them that they will ultimately regret. Dries did this for this anti-spam module, Mollom. I don't think he'd be so happy if core features like Views or CCK performed identically. Drupal would effectively suck. I guess thats all the more reason to reject the idea that plugins are derivative works.
- jmillikin 17y ago
  Remember that the GPL is a copyright license. This means that the only cases in which it matters are when the work is being distributed. The problem with trying to coerce plugin authors into using the GPL is that plugins are usually distributed separately from the core application. This means there's no legal justification for suing somebody who writes a proprietary plugin, because they're not participating in any action relevant to the GPL. If I wrote an application which supports plugins, and I wanted to prevent a particular non-GPL plugin from being used, the only legally justified way I could do so would be to sue my users. That's right -- I'd have to attack the very people using my software. Not the plugin authors, the users. Ironically, this means that selling a proprietary plugin is safer than hosting it. I wonder what Dries would think about that.
  - carussell 17y ago
    I believe the use case at hand is, given person Tom who has purchased a premium WordPress theme, is the theme a derivative work, allowing Tom to redistribute the theme to whomsoever he chooses?

by sethg 17y ago

bricestacey 17y ago

I should preface this that I don't really know much about copyright law. The sticky point to me is that you could write WP themes as binaries called using fork/exec. So in essence, the developer's choice to use WP function calls and variables effectively makes it a derivate work, at least in my opinion. I'm not a big fan of this, though it makes the most sense in my mind (at least with my opinion mostly biased by the GPL). I remember reading Dries, the found of Drupal, effectively claiming that all Drupal modules were GPL'ed and not liking it so much that I have altered my plans for future Drupal modules (all the better for me, my intellectual property will not be open for all to witness as I intend a more hosted solution which I can charge a higher premium for). Ultimately, I feel like crusades by open source projects (WordPress, Drupal, etc) to GPL their modules will backfire and create a more restrictive, hosted component to them that they will ultimately regret. Dries did this for this anti-spam module, Mollom. I don't think he'd be so happy if core features like Views or CCK performed identically. Drupal would effectively suck. I guess thats all the more reason to reject the idea that plugins are derivative works.

jmillikin 17y ago
Remember that the GPL is a copyright license. This means that the only cases in which it matters are when the work is being distributed. The problem with trying to coerce plugin authors into using the GPL is that plugins are usually distributed separately from the core application. This means there's no legal justification for suing somebody who writes a proprietary plugin, because they're not participating in any action relevant to the GPL. If I wrote an application which supports plugins, and I wanted to prevent a particular non-GPL plugin from being used, the only legally justified way I could do so would be to sue my users. That's right -- I'd have to attack the very people using my software. Not the plugin authors, the users. Ironically, this means that selling a proprietary plugin is safer than hosting it. I wonder what Dries would think about that.
- carussell 17y ago
  I believe the use case at hand is, given person Tom who has purchased a premium WordPress theme, is the theme a derivative work, allowing Tom to redistribute the theme to whomsoever he chooses?