[wp-hackers] Plugin Licenses

[Computer Guru]

Sounds great :)

That's exactly what I'd like to see as a matter of fact :)

I had a update-beacon system for WP 1.5 a long time ago now, it was a
de-centralized update system that relied on plugin authors publishing their
own update feeds according to a standard - that way licenses play
absoloutely no role in that matter, but I think a WP-hosted update beacon
servicing only free code sounds ideal.

Same as the readme.txt feature for wp-plugin listing of non-hosted code,
dev. could use that (GPL'd Readme.txt) to trigger an update beacon alert,
etc.... 


Computer Guru
NeoSmart Technologies
http://neosmart.net/blog/


> -----Original Message-----
> From: wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com [mailto:wp-hackers-
> bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Doug Stewart
> Sent: Friday, March 16, 2007 8:12 PM
> To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
> Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] Plugin Licenses
> 
> On 3/16/07, Computer Guru <computerguru at neosmart.net> wrote:
> > Beer of course.
> >
> > I have my own license I use for my free stuff (not WP, which I use
> GPL for),
> > and it's basically Creative Commons for software... Totally free,
> just to my
> > liking :)
> 
> I think we're all addressing two separate concerns here:
> 
> 1) Licensing for that which gets hosted on wp-plugins.org
> 2) Licensing for plugins listed in the "update beacon".
> 
> I say that GPL-only is fine for #1, as that's the stricture that
> Automattic has placed on hosting stuff on their gear, as is their
> right.
> 
> I say that, if we do any sort of external notification for code hosted
> outside of wp-plugins, we add a "License" field to the readme.txt (or
> whatever) that consists of one of a few enumerated "safe" license
> types - Apache, BSD-style, CC, whatever.
> 
> In our formatted readme.txt, we ought to have a "download URL" or
> similar REGARDLESS of whether a plugin is hosted on wp-plugins or not.
>  This way, a non-GPL (or non wp-plugin-hosted) plugin COULD create a
> project on wp-plugins that simply consisted of a readme.txt (whose
> license would obviously have to be GPL, although I'm not quite sure
> what that would even mean).  The update checker on each WP install
> would query the readme.txt's of the plugins it was concerned with and
> then proceed to the URL listed.  If it's on wp-plugins.org, much the
> better.  If it's on foo.bar.example.com, pull it from there.
> 
> Make sense?
> 
> --
> -Doug
> 
> http://literalbarrage.org/blog/
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