500 Plugins To Possibly Be Purged From The Repository

It’s been awhile since we’ve had a discussion revolving around those three magic letters GPL. It looks like we’ll be talking about it again considering that somewhere around 500 plugins run the risk of being purged due to their incompatibility with GPLv2. There has been an ongoing discussion within the past 11 months regarding various licenses and what is and is not compatible with what WordPress uses. It looks like the core team has been monitoring the discussion considering Andrew Nacins comment:

The core team plans to discuss plugin directory licensing once none of us are sick or traveling. So, expect an update here in the next week or so.

The arguments have been laid out, so no need to continue to do so. Not trying to stifle discussion, but, you have all made your points.

Jane Wells also participated in the tract ticket discussion:

I would think we would want everything on wordpress.org to have consistent and compatible licensing. If we’ve moved away from that, is Matt aware of it? (I wasn’t.) He’s always said in the past that anything promoted (including being hosted) on wordpress.org needs to be 100% GPL, and said that no one should ever have to wonder what they can/can’t do with something we host, because the license would be the same/compatible.

I also think the end goal for WordPress.org would be for consistency across the site with regards to licensing. No one should have to guess or worry about which license a particular piece of code is using if it’s being hosted by WordPress.org. At the end of the day though, it looks like license consistency is easier said than done.

*Update*
Until the guidelines have been thoroughly reviewed and discussed amongst the core team, Plugins that violate the current guideline but are compatible with GPLv3 will not be de-listed.