[wp-forums] Services forum

[Michael Niziol]

I might as well add my unsolicited opinion to this topic!

The "donation" plug-in
thread<http://wordpress.org/support/topic/65414?replies=15>I think is
a good example of the 'collateral' damage that would come from
allowing unsolicited commercial services. I will try to keep my explanation
short, though I've been called many, many things, "being of few words" is
not one of them.

The WordPress support forum is the official organ (I'll probably be sorry
for using that word to describe it..) and as such I think it is important to
maintain some sort of pseudo-officialism, at least in such a way as to
uphold certain WordPress (and in the larger picture, certain
community-developed project) standards in general, but especially when it
comes to defining policy relating to the commercialization of ancillary
services based around a non-propriety, communal effort such as WordPress.

To offer any sort of benediction to those commercial services, those
services must 1) be compliant with all terms of the community (including
licensing etc) and 2) they must be legitimate, respectable services. Some
agreed to, basic standards must be enforced with regards to this topic
otherwise it will degenerate into a free-for-all, "any twat can advertise
expert services when they still haven't mastered turning on a computer yet"
spam fest. Even though I have had some past disagreements with the
moderators, I still respect each of them and I know they are not naive
enough to believe that this doomsday scenario won't happen, because we all
know that it is not a question of if or when, but only at which exponential
rate it will grow. Now about standards, would we allow a paid service to be
advertised, if for example it violated the GPL which WordPress is released
under?

I'd hope the answer is no! My views on the "donation" thread are that it may
very well violate the GPL, as it requires WordPress and some internal
functions or methods of WordPress to function, there has not even been a
suggestion to the contrary that it or any plug-in can be a stand-alone
programme. After reading pertinent sections of the GPL and doing some
Googling, this is a best a shady-grey area. Do we know for certain that this
plug-in makes an attempt to profiteer by violating the GPL? Of course we
don't, but we also don't know that it does not – and this is the problem
relating to point #1. We can't very well endorse a product or service that
capitalizes, in violation of a specific license term, on the community
developed code of WordPress. I would contend that we would require a solid
legal opinion on what exactly constitutes a derivative work or a separate
programme in terms of plug-ins, before we could allow people to advertise
commercialized plug-ins, unless of course we want the doomsday scenario to
happen. Though WordPress is community based, it is in the bests interests to
ensure that the community is not pillaged by allowing the whoring of
WordPress code to whichever marketeer can turn out rubbish the fastest.
Though I loathe to use Microsoft as an example, it protects it's copyrights
and such to protect it's bottom-line (aka: profit), just as WordPress must
protect it's bottom-line, the community and the community is not served by
having to try and figure out if twat #1 peddling "WordPressXL" is the thief
or if twat #2 peddling "WordPress Ultra" is the thief and that is exactly
what would happen if we allowed the license, both in legality and morality
to be violated by anyone, but especially by someone seeking to make some
profit off of that violation. OK, so someone has a plug-in, it doesn't
violate the GPL, so now do we just allow that to be advertised?

I hope not! Then to the next issue, how do we know that though a product may
be legitimate that it is not a scam? We don't, unless we have mechanisms to
guarantee quality and to have any entrepreneur agree to a stringent set of
terms (for things such as refunds etc). The work involved to maintain that
and ensure compliance would be enormous and again, we'd have to resort to
invoking the lawyers to enforce compliance with those terms. Issues #2 seems
trivial to me, as I don't believe it would be possible for us to adequately
and confidently fulfil issue #1.

Now why does all of this matter you may ask? Even though we would
specifically state that no service is endorsed, the services are not under
our control etc., in the end, if a link appears on the official WordPress
site, officially endorsed or not, there is a placid endorsement attached to
that. Thus, I believe we would have at the very least a moral responsibility
to protect users from trolls and to a varying degree, I'm sure we'd find
ourselves in some sort of legal predicament when (and again, not if but
when) someone is swindled and in the end, it would only drive users away
from WordPress, why go with WP and it's bastion of rubbish peddling trolls
when I could go to a paid programme (such as MT) and get guarantees and
professional, authorized support? I would guess many would choose the
2ndoption and thus as this would go on, WordPress, instead of being a
high-quality, well-made blogging tool, would descend into the ranks of
something with a slogan like "New Version 3 – 1000% more spam and it's all
free!*"

Cheers,

Michael Niziol.

The fine print:

*The software, we actually like to call it spam-ware, is free, but believe
you me, once you get done using our "support forums" and paying "experts"
for "professional" advice, services and plug-ins, you'll think you just got
a visit from the tax man and what's worse, you'll really wish it was the tax
man! ;)