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Philipp Stracker I totally agree with you, Alan. A free plugin comes with no guarantee for support, functionality, or other warranties. Users should not take it for granted to be treated like paying customers. On the other hand, I feel this is a little different case: More than 400.000 websites installed the original plugin. The WordPress auto-update functionality distributes that change to hundreds of thousands of websites – and swaps out a plugin that the web designers did knowingly install (“WP User Avatar”) with a completely different plugin that none of those users ever wanted to instant (“ProfilePress”). When looking at the plugin source code, you can see that the original plugin is inside a sub-folder named “deprecated”. The rest of the plugin is an entirely different code-base that simply imports “deprecated/wp-user-avatar” files. I love free software and support developers where possible. But this update was a sample of how open source should not work. It’s not about the legal aspects of GPL software (nobody accused the author of breaking the law or license agreement), but that such actions destroy the trust in the public repository.
Philipp Stracker
I totally agree with you, Alan. A free plugin comes with no guarantee for support, functionality, or other warranties. Users should not take it for granted to be treated like paying customers.
On the other hand, I feel this is a little different case: More than 400.000 websites installed the original plugin. The WordPress auto-update functionality distributes that change to hundreds of thousands of websites – and swaps out a plugin that the web designers did knowingly install (“WP User Avatar”) with a completely different plugin that none of those users ever wanted to instant (“ProfilePress”).
When looking at the plugin source code, you can see that the original plugin is inside a sub-folder named “deprecated”. The rest of the plugin is an entirely different code-base that simply imports “deprecated/wp-user-avatar” files.
I love free software and support developers where possible. But this update was a sample of how open source should not work. It’s not about the legal aspects of GPL software (nobody accused the author of breaking the law or license agreement), but that such actions destroy the trust in the public repository.
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