In reply to Peter Knight.

GPL is a license designed to help big companies get code without paying for it. Maybe if a big company uses my code I would like it to pay?

Lets see how the GPL was abused in the history of wordpress.by big companies ripping off small players 1. back when gravatar just started there were about 3 plugins that provided the auto generated avatars. To be fair I don't know if gravatar ripped their code, or used some other source but the end result was the same, IIRC version 2.5 included the gravatar service and the plugins became not needed, all this without even saying any nice words to their authors.

2. remember jipshop? Maybe if they were not GPL their owners would have been milioners and not woo's owners. If it wasn't for GPL Woo could not have just offered a much better salary to only two people and make the plugin their own.

2.5 iThemes adopted "better security". The guy that wrote it got a several months salary out of it, but this is probably not how much the software was worth by itself with it huge install base. Not having the code as GPL would have given the owner a much better starting point for negotiation (to be fair to ithemes, we don't know the terms of the deal, and for sure they ended up to be more ethical than woo any way you look at it).

3. The default security wp-engine use is the limit login plugin. Did they pay to use it? Why should they? No wonder the plugin is not supported any more.

The idea that you "give software for free and monetize on support" just don't work when you need to compete against bigger companies which have more resources to give better support.

And CodedCanyon is still not a GPL market place, it just gives you the option to select GPL as a license instead of their default license, therefor I have no idea were you both come up with "everybody wants to use GPL as a license", with 4k plugins on CodeCanyon (probably more actually maintained plugins then in the repository) that claim is a very sad joke.