Premium add-on licensing question

• rathpeter

• May 6, 2014 at 4:10 pm

I have just purchased ACF Repeater Field premium Add-on, I like it!
I would like to make premium plugins including ACF Repeater Field plugin into my plugin.

You mentioned on your site that ACF base plugin and Repeater Field Add-on may be included into any plugin, so this solution technically right for me. I have found one more constraint on ACF site, that Repeater field add-on may only be included in a premium = not free plugin.

Advanced Custom Fields plugin and repeater field add-on are licensed under GPLv2. If I include them into my plugin, I get a plugin which contains GPL parts, so I must be licensed my premium plugin under GPLv2.

In this situation I don’t understand the constraint that Repeater field add-on may ONLY be included in a premium plugin.
GPLv2 allow me to charge a fee for my product, but if a customer buy it, he will have the right to redistribute it for free or for a fee, because GPL2 license allow it. In this situation my and your GPL premium plugin may become a free plugin, and can be distributed for free (or for a fee)!

Here is a link about this problem: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleAlone

In my opinion, in case of those frameworks that support making of premium software products LGPL, MIT, or similar licenses are better than GPL, if you really would like to sell your plugin for a fee, or you really would like to provide your customers to include this framework in their own premium product.

Best Regards,
Peter

• epohs

• December 18, 2015 at 5:43 am

Agreed, this is a pretty misleading caveat. The documentation on embedding ACF in your own plugin states:

You can include the (free) Advanced Custom Fields plugin within a free or premium theme/plugin.

http://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/including-acf-in-a-plugin-theme/?version=4

But, what it leaves off is that if you do this your premium plugin will become open source.

• tdmalone

• March 23, 2017 at 9:34 am

… in case of those frameworks that support making of premium software products LGPL, MIT, or similar licenses are better than GPL …

They may be… but WordPress is already licensed under the GPL. So there’s thousands of people to get agreement from if that was going to change 😉

But, what it leaves off is that if you do this your premium plugin will become open source.

It’s not just including ACF in a premium plugin that makes it GPL’ed – it’s also creating the premium plugin as a derivative of WordPress (unless it was very clearly not derivative… but that would be hard to argue IMO!)