WP License Issue

[aarreedd]

rrssb is licensed "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license". Wordpress requires a GPL-Compatible license for all plugins in their repository. As a result, WP removed the rrssb plugin. Can rrssb's license change to be GPL-Compatible?

[QWp6t]

You can also workaround it. Have your plugin download rrssb upon activation. Then you're not distributing the plugin with non-GPL code.

[QWp6t]

Also what you're asking is a bit absurd. rrssb doesn't have to "change" their license. It can be released under more than one license. They can also release to you, specifically, under GPL while still using Creative Commons here on Github.

[aarreedd]

I am not particularly familiar with how the licensing works. If we want the plugin to be available lets find a solution. You can send a pull request to the plugin itself if you want https://github.com/alan-reed/rrssb.

Is kni-labs labs willing to release the code under an additional license?

[QWp6t]

I didn't realize that Kni-Labs is releasing it under Creative Commons. CC SA-BY isn't intended to be a software license. None of the Creative Commons licenses are appropriate for software except for CC0, which is a dedication to public domain. To wit, Creative Commons licenses are primarily intended to be for artists, including musicians, writers, authors, photographers, etc.

Here are couple of excerpts from Creative Commons.

1:

Considerations for licensors

[...]

Type of material

Make sure the material is appropriate for CC licensing.

CC licenses are appropriate for all types of content you want to share publicly, except software and hardware.

2:

Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software?

We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses made available by the Free Software Foundation or listed as “open source” by the Open Source Initiative.

Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many software licenses also address patent rights, which are important to software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works. Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the major software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed work with other free software. Existing software licenses were designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of rights to the Creative Commons licenses.

Our licenses are currently not compatible with the GPL, though the CC0 Public Domain Dedication is GPL-compatible and acceptable for software. For details, see the relevant CC0 FAQ entry. We are looking into compatibility of BY-SA with GPL in the future; see the license compatibility page for more information.)

While we recommend against using a CC license on software itself, CC licenses may be used for software documentation, as well as for separate artistic elements such as game art or music.

Because of this, I think Kni-Labs should reconsider the license under which RRSSB is released. GPL, MIT, Apache, etc. are software licenses. MIT, Apache v2, and Mozilla are all compatible with GPL. There are others as well. Free Software Foundation has a list of GPL compatible licenses.

[joshuatuscan]

Thanks for the digging QWp6t, I think we'll switch the license to either Apache or MIT. Just have to have a chat with the team and see which one makes the most sense. We want to share it freely, but don't want anyone to make money off of selling the source code outright.

[QWp6t]

While you guys are mulling it over, you might consider reading a series of articles by EllisLab (creators of ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter).

https://ellislab.com/blog/entry/software-license-awareness-week

• https://ellislab.com/blog/entry/gpl-or-not-to-gpl
• https://ellislab.com/blog/entry/four-dirty-words-intellectual-property-trademarks-and-patents
• https://ellislab.com/blog/entry/contributor-license-agreements
• https://ellislab.com/blog/entry/software-license-wrap-up-and-osl-3.0

[b2z]

Hello guys!

Any update on it? I want to use it on my Joomla website and as I understand I can't with this license. Hope you will update it.

Thanks!

[dbox]

@joshuatuscan I can't remember where we landed on this one...

[dbox]

@b2z So what are you recommending we use? We just don't want people to be able to release RRSSB as a paid plugin by itself. Totally fine for you to build into templates or w/e.

[dbox]

@alan-reed @b2z Switched to MIT License

[jmcbee]

Hello, @alan-reed I hope you can bring the plugin back to da wordpress directory.

[aarreedd]

Thank you to kni-labs for changing the license. I need to update the Wordpress plugin with the latest RRSSB code and then resubmit it to Wordpress. Hopefully I will have a chance to work on it sometime soon.

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 7:27 PM, Xof Nagem notifications@github.com wrote:

Hello, @alan-reed https://github.com/alan-reed I hope you can bring the plugin back to da wordpress directory.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/kni-labs/rrssb/issues/64#issuecomment-94972786.

---

Alan Reed

pub: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x883581C543909213 http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x883581C543909213

[jmcbee]

Thank you @alan-reed Good day!

[jmcbee]

:sparkles: