[wp-hackers] Copyright violations by plugin in the WordPress plugin directory.

[Austin Matzko]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 5:03 PM, Joost de Valk <joost at joostdevalk.nl> wrote:
> On Jun 27, 2008, at 10:58 PM, Alex King wrote:
>
>> http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.php
>>
>> #1 & 2 under TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND
>> MODIFICATION likely apply here.
>>
>>
> Yup, think so too. (though IANAL) what's a man to do?

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, just (apparently) ignorant:
which are the lines that forbid 1) copying without attribution and 2)
not notifying the original developer?

In the sections Alex King points to, I see requirements that the
derived work must maintain license compatibility with the GPL, which
this ripoff plugin has done explicitly.

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 5:03 PM, Dan Coulter <dan at dancoulter.com> wrote:
> The original author of the code holds the copyright, and the GPL states that
> you must maintain the copyright notices of the code that you use.

The closest thing I can find to that is that one must "keep intact all
the notices that refer to this License," which isn't quite the same,
and is obeyed by the ripoff in invoking the GPL.  Could you quote the
section you had in mind?

It's also worth pointing out that there are no notices of copyright in
Joost de Valk's code available at
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta/, so even if your
interpretation is correct the ripoff has nothing to maintain.