(Timp estimat pentru citirea acestui articol: 3 min)
His point is right, but the approach is inappropriate. King Rat found about the CformsII plugin for WordPress while he was working on a friend’s website. He was not experienced enough to build his own plugin to handle contact forms, but he said to himself: „Hm, why not ruin this one?”
So, he posted this, accusing Oliver Seidel of lying when he claimed that the plugin was open-source. The problem is that Oliver never claimed that Cforms was open-source and he protected his byline all the time in the plugin pages. So, the only problem was that the plugin was promoted through WordPress Repository, which is a zone reserved for GPL work.
Oliver got mad and he decided to withdraw CformsII from WordPress.org, stop developping the plugin after version 10.2 and close the support forum.
I am wondering why the guys from WordPress.org didn’t erased the plugin if they were thinking it violated GPL version 3 and if Mr. Rat is happy now. I would have suggested Rat to contact Oliver first, then write the condemnation letter.
As far as I’m concerned, I was never bothered by the obliggation to keep the credit line, because the plugin was offered for free. I liked the plugin so much that I decided to translate it into Romanian. I would like to see the plugin being developed further and I hope Oliver will reconsider his decision.
UPDATES
- In a recent e-mail I received from Oliver, he says he is dissapointed, not mad and that he made the decisions himself, not forced by Rat or WordPress.org.
- Elizzza wonders if we can all do something about it. Maybe contact Oliver and ask him to keep a version with no byline on WordPress.org and a full version on his site.
- Randy believes that removing a plugin from the WordPress Repository will kill it for the general public. I don’t think so, because there are simple contact forms plugins for the general public. CformsII is very complex and very customizable and you can’t find anything similar on the free net. Plus, there is a comprehensive support section that beats everything I saw in terms of plugins for WordPress.
- Leandro says he doesn’t like plugins where authors insert their byline. But Leandro can remove that byline if he wants to show users that he doesn’t care about the author’s work and credit. Or he can search for other plugins that don’t do that. Or create his own.
So, when you „translated it into Romanian” you are admitting that you violated the author’s copyright (since the plugin was not GPL)?
Maybe the fact that it was wrongly listed in the GPL plugin repository led you to wrongly think you had the right to do that. Ooops. Now I hope it is clearer for you why there was a problem.
No, I just contacted Oliver and asked for his permission to translate the plugin. He granted me the permission and offered me support during the translation process. The translation package was promoted on his website and in the WordPress repository.
@anony mouse: GPL is not the only open source license though the plugin does not appear to be open source at all from my understanding.