[Fedora-legal-list] wordpress plugins -- licensing

[Richard Fontana]

On Thu, 2 Apr 2009 20:41:06 -0500
Ian Weller <ianweller at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/ states that all the plugins hosted
> on WordPress's website (the SVN repo is svn.wp-plugins.org, and
> wp-plugins.org redirects to the website listed first here) are
> licensed under the GPL unless otherwise noted in the source.
> 
> Is it OK to assume GPL then for all non-specific plugins, and if so,
> which version?
 
Here I wouldn't assume a plugin without any specific licensing
information is licensed under (some version of) the GPL, one
particular reason being that elsewhere it is said 

  Want to see your WordPress plugin here? Go add it! All we require is
  that it be GPL Compatible. 

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

and

   There are only a few restrictions

   1. Your plugin must be GPL Compatible.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/about/

(both of which link to the gnu.org page on GPL-compatible licenses).

This makes it (more) difficult to argue that the author of the
non-explicitly-licensed plugin can be expected to have understood that
everyone would take GPL to be the license.  It would seem to be
possible to get your plugin hosted even if you never see, or should
have seen, that statement at http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/. So I
think the best course of action in such cases is to contact the author
to get clarification on the licensing.  

 - RF