The Ultimate Guide to Legally Protect Your GPL WordPress Plugin Business Against Trolls

Software licensing can be very confusing subject, especially in the open-source world. Boundaries of legality and ethics aren’t always clear. But as business owners focused on selling WordPress GPL plugins, it’s our duty to understand these topics thoroughly. This post will not address ethics and will focus on the legal considerations. It will provide you a step-by-step actionable formula, including feedback from experienced attorneys in this space, to protect your WordPress business against plugin ‘trolls.’ As a plugin developer for the past five years, I’ve read tons of articles discussing the GPL, its freedoms, and the challenges associated with running a GPL-compliant business. But in the last few months, this topic has become even more significant for me. In August, a Twitter account named WordPress Plugins (https://twitter.com/plugswp) followed me. As a matter of habit, I checked their profile to learn more about that user. I soon discovered that the handler was associated with ‘wppluginscheap.com,’ a plugins & themes ‘troll’ that touts itself as “the number 1 source for Cheap Premium WordPress Plugins and Themes.” Browsing the site, I found many popular premium plugins like Yoast #wordpress #smallbusiness #entrepreneur

https://managewp.org/articles/11511/the-ultimate-guide-to-legally-protect-your-gpl-wordpress-plugin-business-against-trolls