Re: GPL Question re upcoming plugin release
Lots of different opinions about this, but lets face it, will wordpress sue you if you don’t use GPL license on your plugin/theme? Anyway, I haven’t found any legal evidence that your forced to use GPL on your plugin/theme, just speculations and opinions.
Vladimir Prelovac gave solutions of this problem on his blog a while back.
The solution exists and is technical in nature. For plugins you can develop your whole code as a library under your own licensing model. Then you would have the wordpress plugin which will call functions from your library. The plugin itself becomes GPL but the library not and you are free to slap any kind of license and restriction to it.
For themes it is a bit of a different story. Having read the GPL FAQ carefully this is my interpretation. First solution: You do not need to call any WordPress functions in your theme, but you can connect to the database directly and get the information you need. This method is possible but not elegant at all.
Second solution is to have your theme in external php files and one WordPress index.php. This file will use WordPress functions and only include() your files as neccessary. Again index.php would fall under GPL, all other files won’t.