[wp-hackers] Plugin Licensing

[Trent Martin]

You just have to face it, either you follow Matt's philosophy and let other
people copy and even resell your stuff or the WordPress/Automattic inner
circle will completely shun you from the community. It doesn't matter if
your code is 100% your own work and distributed separately from WordPress,
if it touches WordPress in any way Matt says it is a derivative work. You
can use all the logic, facts, and legal precedents you want but it won't
make any difference to them, it's either GPL or you're out.

None of the core bloggers will let you advertise on their sites, they will
refuse to let you sponsor Word Camps, and you will basically be treated as a
bastard in the community. If you try to converse with important people in
the community and they find out you sell non-GPL software, the conversation
abruptly ends.

Also, you cannot advertise your plugin on wordpress.org and of course cannot
use any of the distribution or update methods built into wordpress so your
customers are forced to manually update your software.

So yeah go ahead and argue.