– 451 CAOS Theory » The trend towards permissive licensing

It is worth noting that the number of projects using the GPL licenses has increased in real terms over the past few years. According to our calculations based on Black Duck’s figures, the number of GPLv2 projects rose 5.5% between June 2009 and June 2011, while the total number of open source projects grew over 16%.

[emphasis added]

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So, do themes and plugins serve a system-level or a user-level function?

p.s. Some have compared WordPress plugin and theme API to the way Linux loads kernel modules, when in fact relating it to system call interface (SCI) would be more appropriate.

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I have come to conclusion that its purpose is to give everyone the freedom to do whatever they want with my work as long as they retain the freedom to derive from it.

With every software there are only two things one can do with it — either run it or modify it. By applying the GPL licence to my original work I am making sure that these two things can always happen and nobody can take those freedoms away.

The important point is that I am ‘enforcing’ these rules only in the context of the work that I have written and distributed. WordPress has been built upon the b2 blogging software by modifying its source code and adding new functionality, and because b2 was licensed under the GPL, the derived and altered source code is also licenced under the GPL. Although there might be not a single line of code left from the days of b2, WordPress started off as a tiny modification of its source code, and therefore must retain its licence. This is a very important point to understand for those trying to dismiss the spirit of GPL, because it’s the only thing left when every single line of code is different from the original. And it doesn’t matter if that change happened in a single patch or thousands of them.

Plugin functionality in WordPress didn’t exist in b2 and was added only in 2004 when WordPress 1.2 was released. Before that, one would have to make changes directly to the source code in order to alter the way WordPress works.

Therefore, the important question is — if changing the source code is clearly deriving from the original, then what is a plugin? Is it simply an elegant way to “modify” the source code or is it something else?

If we think of the plugin architecture as a “socket” through which one can get access to the “power”, does GPL has any say over what can be plugged into that socket? Do I, as the creator of the “socket”, want to determine and have control over what can be plugged in there?

I view software exactly as devices with plugs which need sockets of power to function. If lower level sockets didn’t exist, everyone would need to write software in assembly with the only knowledge being the hardware on which it will run. Like building a table lamp with its own wind farm.

Relying on existing interfaces for creating new functionality is an inherent feature of how computers work. Even programming languages can be considered as semantic interfaces through which we communicate and control the hardware. For example, WordPress will always need PHP to run. Outside PHP WordPress is not WordPress anymore.

With that comparison in mind, we should note that WordPress can be licensed under the GPL only because the licence of PHP doesn’t impose any restrictions or rules on how the products derived from it are licensed. At the same time, WordPress has no influence over how PHP can be used.

I think that once you create an interface in your software through which you want others to modify or change the way software works, you have given others the freedom to plug in anything into it. You have created an interface which no longer requires others to derive from your original work, in order to use it. When someone uses that interface, nothing is being changed or altered in your original work.

By creating such plugin architecture, you have decided to give others the freedom to add any type of functionality without any restrictions. That added functionality is a derivative work only in a sense that it uses your “socket”, while the functionality itself stands on its own. It’s like plugging an amplifier into an audio system — the amplification depends only on the existence of a signal not on the type of socket it’s passed through.

To conclude, I think WordPress plugins and themes are not derivative works of WordPress. Use of plugins and themes is protected by the freedom Zero of the GPL — “the freedom to run the program, for any purpose”. Once you have allowed users to run any plugins or themes, you can’t limit them to plugins and themes that are licensed only under GPL.

Ubuntu boot splash screen — old (left) and new

Ubuntu has a new logo and identity brand, and I really don’t like. Why through away the legendary friendly circle icon and replace it with a badly kerned wordmark?

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Henry Birdseye: “Is it getting to the point where the software is going to cost as much as the machine?”

Unknown: “I think it will get to that, yes.”

Birdseye: “So, if something like that can cost so much. Why not just make your copy?”

Bill Gates: “If you don’t get a legitimate copy, you won’t be… came aware of the improvements, and… overall the impact that type of ripoff is going to have is that people won’t write quality packages.”

Unknown: “It takes time to write software. We haven’t found any way to really reduce that time. It takes time to define the problem. It takes time to write the software.”

Henry Birdseye: “But increasingly, as you begin to (medal?) with the prepackaged things and get a little experience, you just can’t resist the temptation to do some of your own programming. And people are gonna be doing that.”

Bill Gates: “There’s a lot of people who are forcasting that there’ll be software stores just like there are record stores today and that there’ll be thousands and thousands of those, and I think I have to agree with that.”

And yet, 86-DOS — the operating system which Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen pitched and later licensed to IBM — was actually written by Tim Paterson and called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System).

The irony, however, is that Paterson’s QDOS was hugely ‘influenced’ by CP/M — a widely used and popular operating system at that time written by Gary Kildall.

As a result, IBM PC was running MS-DOS which looked a lot like CP/M but was in fact licensed from Microsoft who bought it for $50,000 from Tim Paterson who originally wrote it to be able to run programs written for CP/M.

MS-DOS (right) interface influenced by CP/M (left)

Although no one knows exactly why IBM just didn’t buy CP/M directly, we can clearly see how the very foundation of Microsoft is built on top of good ideas and work of others. I wish they would acknowledge that.

Sharing knowledge and making it accessible for everyone is the only way to foster innovation and make this planet a better place for all of us. Your knowledge and understanding of things becomes brilliant only when others can use it and build on top of it. So, the greatest aspiration one might have is to become a rock solid gear in this timely universe of billion components which makes it tick, tick, tick.

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However, to enjoy the real value of the Pricey GPL, you have to purchase a monthly subscription to the PriceyGPL.com service (an API key) which displays a random paragraph from one of the GPL licenses.

Questions

1. Can software released under GPL be pricey or does it have to be a service or a subscription tied to it which can be pricey?
2. How are these two ways of pricing different from the users’ viewpoint whose rights the GPL is protecting?

They say it’s GPL, while the price tag reads: “Single-site License (Limited time only) $45″, which clearly violates one of the main freedoms protected by GPL — the freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

Update: Basic Math is now fully GPL.

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Freedom means not having a master — Richard Stallman

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