Violates GPL and Is a security risk to your site

Hi @nmbgeek,

We have a license.txt, terms & conditions, shipped with our premium version, explaining the use of open-source licenses like the GPL, the difference with intellectual property rights and so on.

Our customers can you use our software for all intents and purposes as they see fit. I’m curious what the issue is on your end, as you’re not listed as a customer. So what’s the use case?

As far a ‘serious security issues’. There are occasional patches for minor vulnerabilities, long before publication. This happens for most comprehensive plugins, themes and WordPress core itself. It’s a strength in active threat intelligence and response by developers to keep software up-to-date with the latest security standards.

Let me know if you have questions,

regards Aert

Your website says this: “Our premium software is protected by intellectual property rights and cannot be sold by any other party without proper consent.” Your premium software is built off of GPL technologies and is dependent on GPL (WordPress) thereby subjecting it to GPL and your statement above is a direct violation of GPL..

Hi @nmbgeek,

I now understand the context, which is important. This: “Our premium software is protected by intellectual property rights and cannot be sold by any other party without proper consent.” is stated in the article about nulled plugins, a reaction on related marketplaces.

Nulling our plugins by removing the license check and selling it as is does not violate the GPL, but our terms of use regarding intellectual property rights on media, brand name, designs, texts and so forth.

The premium plugin doesn’t add a new license, it adds a layer of conditions to use our services, as a customer of Complianz. It does not extend to all users.

Reselling the plugin on a marketplace, under our company name, which refers to our support desk, using our servers for extended services while claiming GPL is the same reason we needed to add a layer specific to our customers, not all users, explaining merely the customer relationship and that we can’t provide the same services to customers of other platforms that sell our plugin, even when our company name is used..

The GPL does not extend to how we deliver services, support and updates to our customers, but if someone uses GPL to redistribute our premium software we kindly expect them to use the freedom proposed by the license in the first place, which is in my opinion focused on cooperation and contributing to the community, not undercutting on price and using the name and services of the author to merely sell a plugin..

Concluding, everything mentioned is in the context of the article. A line from the terms of use:

“Except to the extent permitted by mandatory law, the Agreement or any applicable open source licences, the Customer may not reproduce, decompile or reverse engineer any Software provided.” which again is reasoned from nothing is allowed, as any terms of use does, until XYZ, including ‘open-source licenses’.