[wp-hackers] Plugin Licensing

[Otto]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Andy Charrington-Wilden
<andycharrington at gmail.com> wrote:
> [...]However, I accept that the WordPress community has rightfully defined its
> own ethos with respect to acceptable licensing of WordPress Plugins and
> Themes.[...]
>
> That hits the nail on the head. Without any actual court cases happening no one really knows the legality of derivative works.

There is no debate on the legality of it. The GPL makes it perfectly
clear: derivative works must also be GPL.

Now, the question of whether any particular piece of code is
derivative or not is indeed debatable, but only on the merits of the
particular code in question. You can't debate it in a general sense,
realistically. Many people have stated their opinions, many times, and
because it's just their opinion, there's no way to solve that debate.
People disagree and will continue to do so, because they are
disagreeing about their opinions being right or wrong, not about
anything that is actually decidable.

Nevertheless, the wp-hackers mailing list is not really the right
place to have this discussion. Take it to a forum somewhere, please.

-Otto