[wp-hackers] Plugin Licenses

[Doug Stewart]

On 3/16/07, Computer Guru <computerguru at neosmart.net> wrote:
> Beer of course.
>
> I have my own license I use for my free stuff (not WP, which I use GPL for),
> and it's basically Creative Commons for software... Totally free, just to my
> liking :)

I think we're all addressing two separate concerns here:

1) Licensing for that which gets hosted on wp-plugins.org
2) Licensing for plugins listed in the "update beacon".

I say that GPL-only is fine for #1, as that's the stricture that
Automattic has placed on hosting stuff on their gear, as is their
right.

I say that, if we do any sort of external notification for code hosted
outside of wp-plugins, we add a "License" field to the readme.txt (or
whatever) that consists of one of a few enumerated "safe" license
types - Apache, BSD-style, CC, whatever.

In our formatted readme.txt, we ought to have a "download URL" or
similar REGARDLESS of whether a plugin is hosted on wp-plugins or not.
 This way, a non-GPL (or non wp-plugin-hosted) plugin COULD create a
project on wp-plugins that simply consisted of a readme.txt (whose
license would obviously have to be GPL, although I'm not quite sure
what that would even mean).  The update checker on each WP install
would query the readme.txt's of the plugins it was concerned with and
then proceed to the URL listed.  If it's on wp-plugins.org, much the
better.  If it's on foo.bar.example.com, pull it from there.

Make sense?

-- 
-Doug

http://literalbarrage.org/blog/