GPLDL

A friend sent me this link today. It's a very interesting one. So Wordpress is licensed under GPL. This makes it 'free' - free to use, free to access source code, free to redistribute and free to distribute modified copies. And since, under the GPL license, any works derived from the original software must also be GPL licensed, there's an argument to be made that this applies to Wordpress plugins and themes. And it looks like there may be some truth to this. On the Wordpress Themes Licensing Page, Wordpress notes that distributed themes/plugins must be GPL-compliant and that it won't list a plugin or theme in its (free) online repositories unless they are 100% GPL compliant. Digging a little deeper, it seems like CSS is exempt from inheriting the GPL (Wordpress.org), but having a look through the licensing docs for some of the plugins I've bought, I can see that a lot of them are actually fully-licensed under GPL. Looks like most of the themes/plugins I've bought through Envato are split-licensed, where the HTML/PHP is GPL and the CSS is not (as per Envato), though it seems they do also have a large library of 100% GPL themes as well. At first browse, it looks like GPLDL only feature 100% GPL-compliant premium themes and plugins, which means they are free to distribute - you'll obviously have issues if you try to register any of the plugins, though apparently if they're 100% GPL-compliant you won't need to register them to use them. What an interesting, controversial find!