The Lesson of the Advanced Custom Fields Pro / Secure Custom Fields Debacle: Don’t GPL Your Paid Plugins

I’ve been using Advanced Custom Fields Pro since it was a solo project run by Elliot Condon. When you contacted ACF for support, you dealt with Elliot directly. I still think of it that way, even though several years ago, Elliot (after growing the business apparently beyond the scale he was interested in managing) sold ACF to WordPress plugin company Delicious Brains, which itself was later acquired by WP Engine.

Make no mistake: for me and countless other developers, ACF is the reason we can use WordPress as a general purpose Content Management System (CMS). It’s the reason I stopped building my own custom CakePHP-based CMS!

WordPress started as blogging software, and based on all available evidence, the core team, or really its BDFL, Matt Mullenweg, still sees it that way. I suspect it burns Matt up inside that a large contingent of us developers who have made WordPress the most popular CMS in the world only use WordPress because ACF makes it possible, and that we’re using WordPress specifically in ways he never envisioned it being used.

I doubt Matt’s ongoing war against WP Engine is that much about ACF. But it’s unmistakable that with WordPress.org’s (read: Matt’s) recent hostile takeover (don’t call it a fork, because this isn’t how forks work) of the free version of Advanced Custom Fields, renamed to “Secure Custom Fields,” and their even more recent actual fork of the paid Advanced Custom Fields Pro, also confusingly renamed to “Secure Custom Fields” and released for free in the Plugin Directory, WP.org/Matt sees ACF as, at least, a useful pawn in that war.

The thing that really confused me though was how could they get away with it? Advanced Custom Fields Pro is a paid plugin, distributed directly on its own website, to paying customers only.

In order to appear in the WordPress Plugin Directory, plugins are required to carry an open source license, with GPL v2 being the preferred choice. The free version of ACF in the Plugin Directory is, of course, GPL. But the Pro version…?

Strangely, after the news broke about this, I started seeing counterarguments that WP.org absolutely had the right to do it, because there wasn’t any other copyright in the ACF Pro code.

What?

So I checked for myself. Standard practice in WordPress plugins is for the license terms to be included in either the readme.txt file, the plugin’s main PHP file, or both. Here’s the top of the readme.txt file in the latest version of ACF Pro (6.3.11):

Well, there it is. ACF Pro is GPL v2. But just to make sure we didn’t miss anything, here’s what’s in the main PHP file:

I did a multi-file search in the plugin code for any instance of the word “copyright” and came up empty.

Well, that’s not good.

In case you’re not familiar with the GPL/open source, uhhh… yeah. This says in effect that WP.org absolutely has the legal right to fork and freely distribute not just the free version of Advanced Custom Fields, but the paid Pro version as well.

But just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean it’s ethical. And reading pages of the ACF site such as their terms for embedding ACF Pro in other plugins and themes, it is clear that their intentions, while generous, are more restrictive than the GPL.

I’m not really sure how, in all of these years, it never occurred to Elliot, or Delicious Brains, or WP Engine, that they needed to change the license terms for Advanced Custom Fields Pro. There’s nothing to stop them from doing that. Earlier versions of the plugin released under GPL will always be GPL. But newer versions could have switched to a more restrictive copyright, which would have (legally) prevented WP.org from forking ACF Pro.

As it happens, I now find myself somewhat in the position Elliot Condon was in back when I first started using Advanced Custom Fields Pro over a decade ago: a solo developer of a plugin that has both a free version in the Plugin Directory, and a paid Pro version.

My plugin is far more niche than ACF, so I doubt it will ever be valuable enough for a company like Delicious Brains to snap up, or that any company that would snap it up would itself become valuable enough to be acquired by a hosting behemoth like WP Engine.

I’m less valuable than a pawn. But that doesn’t mean my work isn’t of value to me. And that’s why, although the free version of ICS Calendar in the Plugin Directory — by necessity — carries a GPL license, the Pro version emphatically does not. (The latest version’s terms were reworded in the wake of this situation to be even more emphatic.)

Update: After posting this, I read the terms of the GPL more closely, and I think the issue may be that, because ACF Pro is coded in such a way that the free version’s code is deeply integrated with the Pro code, they may legally have no choice but to make ACF Pro GPL as well.

I believe it is within the terms of the GPL, and is fairly common practice among paid plugins (including mine), to put any GPL code libraries into a vendors (or similar) folder, and keep the proprietary code separate. (That’s how ICS Calendar Pro works.)

Since the GPL was written with full operating systems in mind, interpreting its wording in the context of something like a WordPress plugin, which doesn’t exist in compiled form and can’t function outside of a much larger system, can get a little fuzzy. What can or can’t be included in that vendors folder?

This leads to a broader consideration: Do I believe in the principles of open source? Or am I just using open source software opportunistically? Can I both support and contribute to open source and make money off of my software, even if it relies (partially) on other people’s open source projects to function?

I think it is naive to suggest anyone who is actually making a living working with open source software is not in that compromised position. Automattic (Matt’s company) relies on open source software just as much as WP Engine, and does far more to blur the lines between the free and commercial sides of the WordPress ecosystem than WP Engine does. (WordPress.com, anyone?)

There is no money in pure open source. That’s kind of the point. But even the most ardent anti-capitalist still needs money to survive in any modern society. And that money has to come from somewhere, whether that’s working for a for-profit company that benevolently “gives back” to the open source community by committing employee time to working on open source projects, or from indie developers releasing the basic versions of their software for free and selling paid “premium” add-ons to provide a source of income.

New CSS to fix Chrome breaking old CSS (image size/aspect ratio)

Last week I had several clients report to me that their websites were suddenly displaying images at the wrong size — too small. I checked their sites (in Safari, my default browser), and everything looked fine.

Then I realized, it was a bug in the new version of Chrome. (At least, it seems like a bug to me, when CSS code I’ve been using consistently for over a decade suddenly doesn’t render properly in just one browser, right after that browser has been updated.)

Here’s the code I had been using:

img {
  height: auto;
  width: auto;
  max-width: 100%;
}

I discovered that by just removing the width: auto; line, the images rendered at the intended size, and this didn’t seem to break anything in other browsers either. Sweet!

Unfortunately today I had a client contact me with what I initially thought was the same issue. But then they said it was affecting Firefox and Edge as well. (Windows user!) Sure enough it’s also a problem in Safari.

But this time, it’s not that the images are rendering too small; it’s that they’re getting stretched and distorted. Then I realized I had already applied my fix for that client’s site, and it was causing this new issue.

Fortunately there’s another simple CSS fix. (I briefly considered the aspect-ratio property, but that’s not flexible enough for what I’m trying to do.) It’s a newer CSS property that I haven’t used much: object-fit.

It’s really quite simple though. Here’s the new code I’m using that seems to resolve the issue completely. But I suppose I’ll get another email from someone next week describing another edge case where it doesn’t work. Stay tuned…

img {
  height: auto;
  max-width: 100%;
  object-fit: contain;
}

Update (11/21/2024): OK, so maybe as with the PNG-to-HEIC-to-JPEG glitch, this was actually more of a WordPress 6.7 issue. By the way, I reported the PNG glitch and it got patched in 6.7.1, as did this issue… assuming it’s the same issue I’m describing here, which kind of sounds like it. In retrospect it does seem kind of odd that Chrome and WordPress would both introduce image-related issues on the same day. Much more likely that WordPress introduced multiple issues — or, well, maybe just revealed browser issues, but still. Gotta blame someone.

Safari vs. WordPress 6.7 Block Editor: Who’s to blame for forced PNG-to-HEIC conversion?

tl;dr update: I submitted a bug report about this issue to the WordPress Trac, it was fixed in 6.7.1, and I was even credited as a contributor to that version. Now on with the post…

Look at this image:


Now look at this one:


What if I told you those were the same image? Well… I mean… they’re not. Obviously. But they’re supposed to be. They were both the same image when they were on my computer. The same exact file. But I uploaded them to this page in two slightly different ways, and that made all the difference.

The one on top — the screwed-up one — I placed by inserting an Image block in the WordPress Block Editor, and then clicking the Upload button in that block, navigating my hard drive, and locating the image. The one on the bottom, I placed by again inserting an Image block, but this time I just dragged the image from a Finder window into the Safari window. WordPress supports drag-and-drop uploads.

Looking “under the hood,” I discovered that the file on top was somehow getting converted to Apple’s “High Efficiency Image Format,” HEIC (the reason for the C instead of an F is something I’ll leave to the Apple podcasters). WordPress just added HEIC support in version 6.7, which was released this week. Since browsers (other than Safari, I assume) can’t display HEIC images, WordPress automatically converts uploaded HEIC files to JPEG. And that’s why these two images look different. JPEG doesn’t support transparency, so the areas that were transparent in the original PNG got flooded with the nearest available colors1.

But, why should the results of these two upload processes be any different?

Well, after starting in the WordPress Support Forums and then moving over to the Make WordPress Core Trac and finally searching until I stumbled upon a year-old, barely active thread on the Apple Developer Forums, I discovered that Safari has a bug — I mean it has to be a bug, right? — where, if a file upload input field says it accepts HEIC format, Safari automatically converts the uploaded file to that format, apparently with no option not to do that. (I looked around all of the settings, even the developer ones, and didn’t see anything about this “feature” at all.)

And sure enough, WordPress 6.7 is a bit haphazard with its “support” of HEIC uploads, which made it easier to confirm the cause. There are two ways, generally speaking, that WordPress handles file uploads: the browser upload, via an <input type="file"> HTML field, and a JavaScript/AJAX/React/whatever drag-and-drop option.

The <input type="file"> field in the Image block of the Block Editor has added HEIC support via the accept="image/heic" attribute. But the input field in the old school Media Library upload page has not been similarly updated. (It’s become a fact of life in the WordPress world that most of the core team’s attention is on Block Editor stuff these days, and older features get ignored.) Uploading images in the Media Library does not do the conversion. Likewise, whatever exactly is going on with the drag-and-drop method also does not involve the accept="image/heic" attribute that causes Safari to do its mischief.

Unfortunately, it looks like the only “solution” at this point would be for WordPress to do a browser sniff and remove the accept="image/heic" attribute if the browser is Safari. The only reason that was explicitly added was to get Chrome to support HEIC uploads; as I understand it, Safari would support them regardless, but explicitly declaring HEIC support is apparently what triggers Safari to make the conversion.

So, practically speaking, Safari users who want to upload PNGs to their WordPress sites just need to be sure to only upload via drag-and-drop, or the Media Library.

(I haven’t tested, but I suspect JPEG uploads are likewise getting converted to HEIC and then back to JPEG, which probably results in a reduction of image quality.)

Side note on how I discovered this in the first place: Two days ago I was writing another blog post somewhat critical of Apple, and I found when I was trying to upload a screenshot of a window from my Mac — Mac screenshots are saved as transparent PNGs — the transparency was turning black. I was so driven to distraction over the situation that I barely managed to finish writing the post.

1 Saying those areas are flooded with color is an oversimplification. It looks like the color of each pixel is being determined consistently with how PNG compression works.

Is Apple ever going to properly address the inevitable, relentless growth of peoples Photos libraries?

I just got a new MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip, to replace my 3-year-old MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip. That older machine was fine, but, well… something in my gut just told me that if I was considering dropping two grand (minus some trade-in value) on a new computer manufactured in China, maybe I should do it before the end of 2024.

Anyway… I have the new MacBook Pro, and it’s pretty great. It’s essentially this year’s version of the same machine it’s replacing. The off-the-shelf model with a 14-inch display and a 512 GB SSD, at the same retail price. The upgrades are all in the Apple Silicon SoC: M4 Pro in place of the M1 Pro, with more cores and 50% more memory. A worthy upgrade to an already solid configuration.

I say “solid” because… well, I’d really like to have more disk space. I do a lot of video editing these days, and that requires a lot of storage. The problem is, Apple charges a ludicrous markup for increased disk capacity. And since external SSDs over Thunderbolt 5 are as fast as internal SSDs, I can get a 4 TB external disk for not much more than a meager 512 GB upgrade to Apple’s internal disk. The choice is obvious, even when weighing the convenience factor.

Which finally gets me (almost) to my point. Last night, after I had everything set up on the new Mac (I chose to manually install apps and copy files, so I could control what did and didn’t get moved over from the old Mac), I had over 300 GB of disk space free. This morning I sat down and was surprised to see I only had 180 GB free. What gives?

Well… what gives is the Photos app. I hadn’t even opened it — on purpose, for the exact reason I’m about to describe — but since I had logged into my iCloud account, the Mac “conveniently” automatically downloaded my entire Photos library from iCloud onto the Mac.

Do not want.

On my previous Mac, I had long since shuffled the Photos library off to an external disk. Honestly I never even really use Photos on my Mac, partly because my library is an unwieldy, 120 GB mess of close to 57,000 images1. But mostly because Apple gives users (almost) no control over how the files are managed on their Macs:

So, basically, you have three options:

  1. Fill up all of the space on your hard drive with your photo library.
  2. Fill up all of the space on your hard drive with your photo library, until your Mac decides you’re running out of space, then let it decide how much space to free up.
  3. Don’t have your photos on your Mac at all.

The default is #2, but it’s a pretty crappy option. Because for your Mac to know how much disk space to keep free, it needs to know how you intend to use it. If I’m not currently working on a video project, I don’t need much space. But if I am, then I can go from needing next to nothing to suddenly needing 200 GB or more of free space. Which means I always want to keep at least 200 GB free, in case I’m about to start on a video project. Once I’m rolling, I don’t want to be distracted with figuring out how to free up space.

Now here’s a twist: since, as I mentioned, external SSDs over Thunderbolt are essentially as fast as an internal SSD, you can easily edit a Final Cut project directly on an external disk. In fact, I do that a lot. But not always. I still want that free space.

Fortunately, Apple does provide a way to put your Photos library on an external disk. It’s easy and it works. But you shouldn’t have to do that.

The thing that really kills me is that it would be so simple for Apple to resolve this issue. All they’d need to do is add a slider to the settings tab from the screenshot above, letting the user set a minimum amount of disk space they want to keep free. Why doesn’t Apple do this? I feel like there’s a very intentional reason. And I think I’d be exasperated if I knew it.

1 Apple is really to blame for the mushrooming library, too. Their automatic tagging by date and location, and AI-assisted tagging of subjects like individual people, pets, etc., make it so easy to find specific images that there is no incentive to put any effort into culling the junk from your library. Growing libraries lead you to pay for larger iCloud storage allocations to hold them. There’s a reason “Services” is Apple’s fastest growing revenue segment. But all of that aside — whatever, I really am not bothered by it — the one place Apple is completely shitting the bed on all of this is handling on-device storage.

Another look

You know the scene in The Big Lebowski, when the goons are in the Dude’s apartment, and the one guy is dunking his head in the toilet yelling “Where’s the money Lebowski?” And then when he lets the Dude up briefly for air, the Dude says, “It’s down there somewhere, let me take another look.”

We are the Dude right now, asking to have our head dunked in the toilet again.