Complete Rip off a Premium Elegant Themes Plugin

No it’s not. It’s GPL. This plugin is a fork.

If it was simply a ‘fork’ for improving code and adding to the community shouldn’t they clearly articulate the improvements. What defines ‘fork’? What level of improvement do I need to make to take advantage of someone elses effort?

Is @claycollins forking into the future with this tweet?
“It’s a GPL plugin and we’ll be adding lots of stuff to our fork for months and years to come.”

Also… did they need to take 100 email templates forward to improve code? Are they their own artistic efforts or are they enjoying leveraging off someone else’s hard work?

andryl , the extent of the fork is to replace our logo with theirs, add additional branding to each opt-in form, and use the free plugin as a method to up-sell their competing product at https://www.leadpages.net.

Nick, need a like button in WP forums. Well said!

@et. Well, it’s what you gave them explicit right to do. Again, it’s GPL. Don’t like it? Stop using it.

Looks like the plugin was taken down.

@fried_eggz I think the intent of GPL went well beyond everyone being able to easily leverage off someone else’s works. The intent is to make the code base better for the community not provide a ‘loss leader’ for gaining email sign-ups to market another product.

The opening closing lines of the Envato guidelines to GPL licence sum it up well for me;
Link: https://help.market.envato.com/hc/en-us/articles/202822660-Guidelines-for-forking-GPL-code

“When forking an open source project, the first step should always be asking: “should I really be forking this project?” In most cases, you should instead consider simply contributing to the existing project. If this isn’t possible, then consider forking into a new project if your proposed changes warrant it.”

“The forked project must provide sufficient uniqueness or improvement over the original project to be accepted on Envato Market. When submitting items based on forked code please outline clearly why you have forked the original code and what enhancements or modifications you have made.”

@andryl, The GPL has no such intent. Go back to Richard Stallman’s writings and understand that the GPL has no interest or intent for better code, only for free code that can be shared and altered and reshared without any restriction. There’s zero mention of “better” anywhere except in the context of free vs not free.

I sincerely hope that LeadPages did not remove ET’s copyright notices.. Everything else they’ve done that I’ve seen is well within not only the letter but the spirit of the GPL, even if it is distasteful to many.

@davidjbullock – understood and we are seeing this fly close to the wind, however I still think R&D should stand for Research and Development, not Rob and Duplicate.

That’s legal in terms of GPL but morally wrong.

“That’s legal in terms of GPL but morally wrong.”

If code authors believe that this behaviour is morally wrong, then they should use a license which doesn’t so easily and explicitly enable it.

The GPL is very clear about it’s what constraints it does and does not carry. And it’s been around for so long that the moral issues have been widely discussed across many programming and business communities.

And yet Elegant Themes still chose to be constrained by the GPL.

Personally, I’m a happy customer of Elegant Themes. I think they are great and I’m going to continue doing business with them.

But Leadpages did nothing ethically and they clearly didn’t violate a license.

WordPress Developers are still in their infancy year to digest this kinda forking, WooCommerce is also a forked version of Jigoshop. That’s I was trying to say. Yes, If it’s under GPL anybody can make anything out of it.

btw Co-Founder of LeadPages.net posted – https://medium.com/@claycollins/why-i-believe-in-rapidology-the-spirit-of-the-gpl-i-e-in-defense-of-rapidology-605d2ea8b083

There’s very little to digest. The GPL is very clear and written in plain English. The preamble sums it up even more clearly.

Any company that bases it’s business model around GLP’d software simply has to read it.

There’s very little to digest. The GPL is very clear and written in plain English. The preamble sums it up even more clearly.

Any company that bases it’s business model around GLP’d software simply has to read it.

+1 to @sunilwilliams

Sunliwilliams, your statement “yet Elegant Themes still chose to be constrained by the GPL” is not really accurate nor fair. If anyone wants to create products for WordPress, the most popular CMS by far and the foundation of almost a fourth of all websites in the world, the GPL is a required beast.

Is it legal what LP did? By all accounts it appears so. But that doesn’t make it any less palatable just because it’s legal.

If a man in his 40’s starts dating my 19 year old daughter, technically it’s legal (in the US) because she’s over 18. But, that doesn’t make it any less of an insult. And it certainly doesn’t take away my right as her father to cry foul. Nor for others to agree with me that the older guy is suspect.