[wp-hackers] Disabing a paid extension of our plugin if the licence is not renewed, is doing this too agressive?

[Ipstenu the Half-Elf]

As you've presented it, it's against the WPORG guidelines for plugins 
and reason for us to shut your plugin down for phoning home if it's done 
on the plugin in the ORG repo.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/about/guidelines/ (see #5 through #7)

Now... I want to stress something. You can totally do this in a way that 
is both friendly to the WPORG repository AND the GPL.

You see, having a free core plugin in the WPORG repository and selling 
add-ons from your own site is PERFECTLY FINE. Easy Digital Downloads 
does it. However, the license check EDD uses is for getting updates for 
the add-ons, and it's not a part of the core plugin but the children. 
Also EDD does not disable the plugin when you don't pay, it disables 
your ability to get UPDATES. So you don't get new versions anymore.

So here, you're not going to shut down my site for not paying (something 
any reasonably annoyed code tweaker could turn off in about 10 minutes 
anyway, just FYI, by removing that check), you're paywalling my updates, 
so I can no longer get the new version which might save me headaches in 
a year when you update the core code base and now my extra cool add-on 
stops working.

You can do this. You should, however, keep in mind the fact that you're 
now making people pay for something that was free, and that rarely goes 
well. I would instead upgrade all the features of the free version, and 
then have all the NEW features be pay-for. It may take a while to build 
up that audience, but it's possible.

> Nicola Peluchetti <mailto:nicola.peluchetti at gmail.com>
> 3 March, 2014 at 3:51:54PM
> We are refactoring our plugin (
> http://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-event-calendar by the way it says
> it hasn't been updated in 2 years, i released 1.10.5 two months ago but i
> will open another thread for this ) to have a basic core and then sell
> extensions.
>
> What i plan to do is disable the extension if the licence is not 
> renewed or
> not entered. This basically means "do not add actions and filters for the
> extension if the licence is not valid". So if the user after one year do
> not renew the licence, i will make a call from our store to our API and
> set the extension as disabled.
>
> Do you think this is too aggressive?Would you advice against this?
>
> *Nicola Peluchetti - Senior PHP Developer @ Timely*
> Twitter: @nik_peluchetti <https://twitter.com/#!/nik_peluchetti>
> Facebook: nicola.peluchetti <https://www.facebook.com/nicola.peluchetti>
> Stackoverflow: 
> Stackoverflow<http://stackoverflow.com/users/397861/nicola-peluchetti>
> Mobile: +39 339 7507235
> _______________________________________________
> wp-hackers mailing list
> wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
> http://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo/wp-hackers
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------