In reply to mark k..

I think it's understandable that the examples you mention can be construed as negative evidence for GPL. Let's take a recent case when a multi-million dollar firm decided to fork a commercial plugin called Bloom and offer it for free, repercussions on Bloom's company be damned. They cried 'GPL' when they got heat for that. So is that negative evidence for GPL? (side note: their plugin got delisted)

I think when we assess business moves that are being made and we focus on the license as the principle facilitator, the big picture gets lost and things get distorted. Let's look at the behaviour of the groups involved in your examples. Any industry, any ecosystem, businesses are operating under capitalistic principles and - especially the bigger players - will conduct themselves with shrewd, aggressive business moves. There is no license on earth that stops businesses from making the kinds of business moves that leave a bad taste in people's mouths.

Even if plugins were coded with restrictive licenses that are specifically designed to protect the author, external parties can still deploy tactics that are just as unpalatable if not more so. Small developers can get copied, bought up and pushed out just as easily. There is no shield for that.

>GPL is a license designed to help big companies get code without paying for it

GPL is an open source license designed to grant important freedoms to users. These freedoms have allowed WordPress to prosper, with a philosophy that people can stand behind. Businesses can leverage that, sure. But they are at least bound to distribute their work, and thus grant their users with the same freedoms. Restrictive licenses don't do that. This environment, were users have these freedoms, is in large part what makes this ecosystem special, big and innovative. It levels the playing field.

It also makes the WordPress environment somewhat rare and special, because what other industry do users have real freedoms? In practice most companies ultimately regard customers are sources of revenue to be extracted and are not incentivized to grant their users freedoms. Restrictive licenses restrain the very freedoms under which WP was allowed to prosper and grow.

GPL is not a protective shield to how the world operates however, businesses will apply all the leverage they can. No license can do that. The notion that the GPL is an impediment to a business just doesn't make sense when you look at it from this point of view. Especially when you consider just how much people are making a living through WP oriented products and services and how many businesses are thriving even though it is competitive as hell.

Also, the danger in focussing solely on circumstances where an original developer got the short of the end of the stick at a particular juncture in time paints a very limited picture. It suggests that deals happen or don't happen because of a license, when good and bad deals happen in every area of business. It doesn't consider impact overall (WooCommerce is now the most popular ecommerce platform, consequently supporting many developers). You also don't consider all the projects that were helped and saved because the work was OSS and others could continue the work despite an original author losing interest or dropping out. Not to mention all the plugins that are better because development can happen in the open under a collaborative framework and attract many contributors.

Another important element is the fact that the license of the code is just a small part of a commercial business. Commercial software is a service industry, we charge people for a service, not the code. The license doesn't make your service copyable at the click of a button. You get to set your own terms. You also retain all the other ways to protect your business through copyright, trademarks and superior service.

Lastly, it's pretty accepted that a big part of WordPress success is because of it's pro-user, pro-collaboration, pro-freedom philosophy and license. Without it the pond would not have grown this big. When we consider commercial vendors that sell their code under different types of licenses that give users less freedoms, it undermines the principles under which WordPress has been able to grow. If we say, that's ok, it doesn't lead to a level playing field. We are then saying that some developers have more rights than others, and some users have less. If the minority of developers who skirt the GPL would grow, it would have a negative impact in the long term.

Overall, the big companies in the WordPress space have bought into what makes WordPress work so well. Many of the premier companies are giving back in the understanding that it grows the pond bigger and that their work is made possible by thousands of contributors. (The companies you mentioned sponsor events, fund things, distribute free plugins.) If it's fairness you want (you cite examples that didn't seem fair), the best way to get it is for every developer to operate under a similar license and grant users the same freedoms.

Ps. CodeCanyon is not great evidence if you want to champion non-gpl licensed plugins, it is a marketplace that is anti-user and anti-developer at the same time.