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Comment by maxloh | Hacker News Reader

> If the plugin had Pro options* then are those closed source and so not available to Wordpress in their fork of the codebase? It's not clear.

Because WordPress is licensed under the GPL, all plugins must be licensed under GPL-compatible licenses. This applies to ACF Pro as well.

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As far as I've understood, the copyleftness of the Wordpress's GPL tainting themes and plugins is or at least has been controversial (I'm not in the WP community, but have read stuff regarding this drama). Wordpress itself uses React and other non-GPL licensed software in the core that yes, may be GPL-compatible but doesn't enforce everything to be GPL'd. When it comes to themes and plugins, I'd consider that userspace, akin to installing Spotify on Ubuntu doesn't make Spotify suddenly GPL'd.

In Linux, not even in user space: ZFS is developed as a kernel module rather than mainline Linux kernel because of its incompatible with GPL license. Or Nvidia's Linux driver aren't even open sourced. Well AMD has proprietary Linux drivers too, but they have an open sourced one also.

Not detracting from the point you're making, but the kernel side for Nvidia drivers for Linux is published on GitHub, by Nvidia. The userspace side is still delivered as pre-compiled binaries, tough.

You're right. But that's a somewhat recent (2 years) release and not compatible with as many GPUs as their closed source kernel side ones drivers, which are still on version parity.

My 1080Ti isn't compatible with those drivers, so I do forget about the open sourced ones.

Fundamentally yes, though it hasn't really been tested in court and I'm not sure that plugins really are obviously derivative works - you can create a plugin that doesn't depend on WP but can be used with WP, but I'm not a lawyer.

Matt and WP's position however includes that this applies to the PHP code but not to accompanying assets like images, CSS, JS (because those can obviously be used without WP). Those only need to be GPL if you want to host it on wordpress.org which the commercial versions of those freemium-plugins are not.

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