GPL questions for a WordPress site hosted on internet

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  • Moderator Yui

    (@fierevere)

    永子

    The output (HTML source) is not considered as affected by GPL license,
    only the PHP code loaded and interpreted together with WordPress PHP core code should be under GPL. This means – all plugins and themes PHP code should be GPLv2, assets can have another license, however there can be still license compatibility issues which pieces can be distributed in one bundle.

    since anyone connected to the internet can see the output of that theme/plugin.

    So, this statement is wrong. Program output is never considered as licensing factor for GPL and most compatible licenses, and even most OpenSource licenses.

    Thread Starter shoeb234abc

    (@shoeb234abc)

    Thanks for the clarification!

    This leads me to another question : the CSS and Javascript portion of a theme/plugin will be distributed to the public anyway (whether the developer wants it or not).

    Even if the CSS/Javascript files are uglified, they can sometimes be un-uglified to get readable source code.

    In this case, assuming that the PHP code is closed-source,

    1. will the CSS/Javascript be affected by GPL?
    2. will the developer need to do anything to avoid GPL violation for CSS/Javascript?
    Moderator Yui

    (@fierevere)

    永子

    assets may have different license, css, js, images…

    text type files can have license mentioned in their headers, you should be able to get unminified files somewhere, either theme or plugin archive or repository

    as assets are not loaded into php interpreter, it isnot required for them to be GPL

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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