[wp-hackers] Re-Selling (your) free plugins

[Glenn Pegden]

On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 6:48 PM, Nathaniel Taintor <
goldenapplesdesign at gmail.com> wrote:

> This kind of thing happens fairly common, and as sleazy as it seems, is
> probably not really a bad thing. As the saying goes, "any well-developed
> ecosystem has its parasites" and it doesn't hurt the overall ecosystem.
>
>
I spend a lot of time on Warriors (I find a lot of potential customers for
our Your Members Membership Plugin there) and I could write a book on what
an peculiar eco-system it is in itself and the absolute opposite of every
geek community I'm proud to be part of. I also can never work out who their
market is, possibly themselves because after you've seen one
get-rich-quick-online scheme and visited one monster-length OptimizePress
sales page, you've seen them all. I can't believe people buy into what they
sell, but they seem to! Everything is about the bottom line everyone is
trying to push their own get rich quick scheme, that's not to say their
isn't a sense of community, there is, but is so orientated on faster ways to
make a million online, that it'll all seem very alien to your average hacker
(full disclosure, I'm a former hacker turned marketer, so I'm can live on
both sides of the fence)

I've also seen some shocking examples of code over there. People were going
nuts over some new WordPress based sales tool a few weeks ago, dozen of
people posting they'd bought it, only for the author to add "hey somebody
suggested some great advanced security features, so in the next version
we'll be adding a PayPal IPN handler"* !

(* If you're not familiar with PayPal, it means he admitted it a public
thread, where is customers are talking to him, that Payments can be faked by
generating false form data and possibly the referrer header).

Please fair WordPress Hackers, stay away from Warriors for your own sake. It
was once describe to me as "being locked in a room full us real estate
agents and used car salesman, they day somebody told them they could make a
million on the internet".

Without getting my old soap box back out, the real problem of course is that
as Automattic won't consider plugins to be none-derivative, it means people
aren't free to release their plugins under a license that allows them to be
freely distributed but not for profit.

Glenn

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Personal Website: http://glenn.pegden.com
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