Despite the way many people are reacting to Chris Pearson in this interview with Matt Mullenweg, I think he made some good points. Chris Pearson is undeniably outspoken and has annoyed me with many of his political statements in the past. He may even be a Republican! If I were less tolerant I’d have deleted my copy of Thesis long ago based on the content of some of his tweets. Not because his framework is non-GPL compliant.
However, on the GPL I agree with him. The GPL is counter-intuitive for small business. Maybe there is a way to make it work well for a small enterprises, but it’s not obvious how.
We built a free GPL compliant WordPress plugin and because we have a high adherence to quality and service, it takes a lot of effort in support and development time. I don’t mind that but I do want to make a paid version of it that protects my time investment in the overall offering. Given that I willingly give the free plugin away for free along with support for said plugin, how can I get paid for the extra effort I place into the paid features? How do I do that? It’s not obvious to me at all – I see Chris’s point of view. I’m not trying to be awkward here – I really want to know the answer. Maybe someone who can pay their mortgage based on their work (non client based please) with wholly compliant GPL plugins and themes could help me out here.
While it is not contrary to the GPL to charge for your work, it is contrary to the GPL to prevent anyone who has a copy of your work from giving it away. Matt argued that anyone taking a free copy of a GPL Thesis wouldn’t be getting Chris himself as part of the deal, and that might be enough to prevent those that want him to take his stuff for free. I am amazed at the number of people now tweeting that they’re leaving Thesis because it’s non-GPL. Have they only just figured this out?
Derivative Works
I think that writing something that merely sits on top of something else doesn’t make it derivative. Thesis for me is not a derivative work in common sense terms, only in GPL terms. If I go my local supermarket (Waitrose, let’s say it’s a GPL supermarket) and buy a GPL cake, then take it home, cover it in icing and stick a couple of icing sugar roses on it then enter it into a cake competition, which I then win, people might say I cheated (analogy for breaking rules of the GPL). But under the GPL, if I go to Waitrose and buy other GPL products such as flour, eggs, sugar, and some other stuff, take them home, make a cake and enter the result into a cake competition and win it, then that’s also not OK. Because it’s still a derivative cake.
GPL supporters will say that’s right – so base your cake on non-GPL supermarket products if that’s how you feel. But I like shopping at Waitrose.
Someone said that these guys really knew what they were doing, having crafted a GPL compliant set of terms and conditions for their premium plugin. Have they? I can’t understand a word of what they’ve written past the first couple of paragraphs. My interpretation of their licensing terms is they are no different in real terms to what Chris is saying except he is coming straight out and saying don’t use my stuff without paying please. The WPProTouch guys say,
We support the spirit behind the WordPress community, and the GPL license. Our effort to protect the identity of the unique nature of our work and the quality of our products is what we aim to preserve, not the control over how our work is modified, etc.
I’ve re-read their terms several times and I really can’t see the difference but then maybe they are too complicated to be meaningful to anyone who isn’t a lawyer (and I suspect to anyone who is).
The only simple answer I can see is to adhere to the GPL whilst avoiding it in some small part. Give to the community yet still get paid. That’s what some premium plugins are doing.
Take Pretty Link Pro – there is a free version and a pro version, but you have to pay to get a license key. You could just give your license key away to others but then you’d be violating the terms of the licence key itself. I think. Maybe this is what the WpTouch Pro people are saying too?
Then there’s ScribeSEO – it’s GPL compliant and is downloadable from worpress.org. You can see the code and re-use it and redistribute it as much as you want under the GPL, for all the good it’ll do you. The guts of the plugin reside on a ScribeSEO server and are not covered by the GPL. It’s essentially a SaaS.
So this is what we all have to do? Create free and pro versions of plugins that we can offer to those who want to learn from and re-use the code, but keep the tricky bits on remote servers so that we can be paid and so provide quality updates and support to our users.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I don’t believe all software should be free. There are a few organisations that can afford to do this due to their size and the enormous profits they make by selling more robust copies of their software and service packages.
That model doesn’t work for small/micro businesses. I want software products to be low cost, sometimes free when the authors feel they can afford to produce something freely, but not free as a rule. In the old days you had to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for database systems whose functionality you can get now for nothing. But the free distribution is now mostly about control and viral marketing.
Marketing done this way isn’t anything other than big business making shit loads of money. If you think GPL software doesn’t serve big business … Remember Marx and his famous “religion is the opiate of the masses” statement? GPL is very similar – it drugs you all into believing in the light. And Matt is one hell of a messiah.
The cake analogy was supposed to highlight the absurdity of winning a cake competition when you haven’t really done any work, and the everyday normally accepted way of winning, (read getting paid) where you have done huge amounts of the work. The GPL would insist that in this case, the cakemaker could only be paid (in both cases ironically) for taking care of the people who got indigestion afterwards.
The GPL is as it is, but it doesn’t make sense. If developers are to work with it, they will always take Matt’s lead, and do as he does, keeping proprietary parts of what they develop behind closed servers and issuing those parts as services or pay-per-use.
Matt Mullenweg does this with his own offerings and in doing so makes enormous amounts of money on the back of the hard work of people who gave their time freely at Wordpress (by exploiting the user base), as do many plugins (ScribeSEO, PollDaddy, are examples).
I mean ScribeSEO is in the Wordpress Plugin repoistory (hence it is OK in the eyes of the Wordpress) and you can download it for free. Try using it without paying. You won’t get far. It’s GPL component is just a shell for a server to request to go elsewhere and do some work then return the results to the GPL shell.
The difference between PollDaddy and Thesis is that Thesis’s work is done on the same server in the same context as the GPL code that it serves. Neither are derivative works, they enhance aspects of Wordpress and the authors should have a choice about the licensing. Currently there is no choice which encourages us all to think in ways to monetise the work we do not wish to do for free, in terms of units of use or access to the parts we wish to keep proprietary.
As this is all legitimate use of the GPL, it has to be the way forward for all, including Thesis in order to comply yet still retain the benefits of Wordpress’ viral marketing.
I sorta kinda replied to this post on my blog. Your bit comes right at the end after I prattle on about all sorts of stuff. It’s not a dig at you, I just attempted to answer your questions.
http://caramboo.com/geek/wordpress/wordpress-the-gpl-and-me/