[wp-hackers] When shady people resell your work...

[Otto]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 11:45 AM, Dino Termini <dino at duechiacchiere.it>wrote:

> Hi list,
>
> we were recently informed that someone was selling our plugin (available
> for free on WordPress.org of course), WP SlimStat.
>
> While this is allowed by the GPL license, they re-branded it as Keyword
> Swarm and removed all the references to the original author.
>
> On top of that, they purchased all our premium add-ons and bundled them
> with their package, even if our license agreement explicitly says that you
> cannot include any of our premium add-ons
> within a free or commercial theme or plugin or other package.
>
> This will end up damaging not just our small group, but the entire
> community around our plugin. If the already little revenue stream is
> choked, we won't be able to invest our time to improve WP SlimStat, which
> is sad.
>
> So I thought I would come to this list to ask for opinions.
>
> Thank you,
> Dino.
>
>
The licensing you use really has nothing to do with it. They would violate
your license even if it was more restrictive or less restrictive. People
pirate games and business software and such too, right? This is really no
different.

The long and the short of it is that you're basically dealing with the
problem of software piracy. There is no solution. There isn't going to be a
solution. At most, you can call a lawyer and sue the offenders for damages,
which is difficult to prove at best. And even then, you probably won't get
any real money out of it.

In the long run, I think that the only way to really cope with this sort of
issue is to sell something else; something which is not software.

If you have never read it, give The Magic Cauldron a read. I like Chapter 3.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldron.html

-Otto