Terms of Service Clarification

  • Resolved Chip Bennett

    (@chipbennett)


    10 years, 10 months ago

    Per the Plugin Terms of Service:

    Use of the Google Publisher Plugin is governed by Google’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. For products and services that can be used with the Google Publisher Plugin, such as AdSense, additional Terms of Service may also apply

    Plugins hosted in the official WordPress Plugin directory are required to be 100% GPL, and as such their use cannot be restricted, as any such use restriction would be incompatible with the GPL.

    Per the license bundled with the Plugin, the Plugin is, in fact, released under GPLv2.0. It appears that the intent is that the Plugin itself and its use are governed by GPL, and only use of the Google services interfaced by the Plugin are governed by the Google TOS.

    If this is correct, please clarify the Plugin Terms of Service to indicate that use of the Plugin is governed by the GPL under which the Plugin is released, and that only interaction with/use of Google services interfaced by the Plugin are governed by Google Terms of Service.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • @chip Bennett Agreed. Valid points.

    Also agreed (and thanks for posting this Chip!), the second statement about their sevices makes sense, but the first one does not in a WordPress plugin.

    The Google TOS does have language regarding open source software, but it is very vague and non-specific as to what it does and does not apply to:

    Some software used in our Services may be offered under an open source license that we will make available to you. There may be provisions in the open source license that expressly override some of these terms.

    That would be wildly open to interpretation if it were ever challenged, whereas the terms themselves are clearly spelled out:

    You may not copy, modify, distribute, sell, or lease any part of our Services or included software, nor may you reverse engineer or attempt to extract the source code of that software

    That’s pretty much the opposite of gpl, so why include it at all?

    Hi – Google product manager here.

    Thanks for flagging this. Our intention was to keep the plugin GPL but use of the service itself tied to our TOS. We will be pushing this update very soon.

    The update will read:
    “The plugin source code is GPL, however use of Google Services through
    the plugin is governed by Google’s Terms of Service and Privacy
    Policy. For products and services that can be used with the Google
    Publisher Plugin, such as AdSense, additional Terms of Service may
    also apply.”

    Thanks!

    Thread Starter Chip Bennett

    (@chipbennett)

    @myksmith, thanks; I think that clarification is perfect.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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