[wp-hackers] When shady people resell your work...

Chris McCoy chris at lod.com
Tue Apr 8 18:04:03 UTC 2014


that¹s a good method, how it updates for example pretty link lite to pro
from the backend.

On 2014-04-08, 1:39 PM, "Blair Williams" <blair at caseproof.com> wrote:

>We've had do deal with this on our plugins as well. The best way we've
>found to deal with it is to develop hosted services that work in
>conjunction with your plugin ... the most direct of which is support and
>updates that are only available to paying customers.
>
>Blair
>
>
>On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 11:33 AM, Otto <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 11:45 AM, Dino Termini <dino at duechiacchiere.it
>> >wrote:
>>
>> > Hi list,
>> >
>> > we were recently informed that someone was selling our plugin
>>(available
>> > for free on WordPress.org of course), WP SlimStat.
>> >
>> > While this is allowed by the GPL license, they re-branded it as
>>Keyword
>> > Swarm and removed all the references to the original author.
>> >
>> > On top of that, they purchased all our premium add-ons and bundled
>>them
>> > with their package, even if our license agreement explicitly says that
>> you
>> > cannot include any of our premium add-ons
>> > within a free or commercial theme or plugin or other package.
>> >
>> > This will end up damaging not just our small group, but the entire
>> > community around our plugin. If the already little revenue stream is
>> > choked, we won't be able to invest our time to improve WP SlimStat,
>>which
>> > is sad.
>> >
>> > So I thought I would come to this list to ask for opinions.
>> >
>> > Thank you,
>> > Dino.
>> >
>> >
>> The licensing you use really has nothing to do with it. They would
>>violate
>> your license even if it was more restrictive or less restrictive. People
>> pirate games and business software and such too, right? This is really
>>no
>> different.
>>
>> The long and the short of it is that you're basically dealing with the
>> problem of software piracy. There is no solution. There isn't going to
>>be a
>> solution. At most, you can call a lawyer and sue the offenders for
>>damages,
>> which is difficult to prove at best. And even then, you probably won't
>>get
>> any real money out of it.
>>
>> In the long run, I think that the only way to really cope with this
>>sort of
>> issue is to sell something else; something which is not software.
>>
>> If you have never read it, give The Magic Cauldron a read. I like
>>Chapter
>> 3.
>> http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldron.html
>>
>> -Otto
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>>
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