7 December

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.

ST:TNG Treadmill Review #8: Time Squared

Time Squared
Season 2 Episode 13
Original airdate: April 1, 1989

Netflix Synopsis

The Enterprise comes across a Federation shuttlecraft that is floating in space and without much power but does exhibit life signs.

My Brief Review

In some ways this episode is similar to the previous one. It’s almost as if the writers of the two episodes were given the same minimal premise and asked to create competing stories. This one is definitely the better of the two, but it still has some significant flaws.

Here, the Enterprise retrieves a derelict shuttlecraft that, eerily, bears the exact same identification as the craft sitting next to it in the shuttle bay. And when they open it, they discover an unconscious Picard on board!

Long story short, time travel, energy vortex, freewill vs. determinism. “Our” Picard ends up killing the “other” Picard and choosing to fly directly into the vortex instead of trying to distract it by sacrificing himself in a shuttle. It works, but it is never explained, and a lot of the story just doesn’t hold water.

In particular, I struggled with Picard’s uncharacteristically hot-headed behavior when attempting to interrogate the “other” Picard in sick bay. The writing isn’t just out-of-character, it is extremely sloppy, because when Picard leaves sick bay he orders Deanna Troi to stay with the “other” Picard, but she immediately gets into an argument with Dr. Pulaski and then storms out.

Memorable Moment

The episode begins in Riker’s quarters, where Riker is apparently demonstrating his culinary skills, using a weird alien egg to supposedly make “omelets” for his guests (Data, Worf, Geordi and Dr. Pulaski). When he starts preparing it, at first he appears to be actually making a crêpe, not an omelet… but then he just tosses it all up and serves them scrambled eggs. I should have known I was in for a sloppily-written episode right at that point, but I was most distracted simply trying to figure out if the writer didn’t know what an omelet was, if Jonathan Frakes was too unskilled to even feign preparing one, or if no one involved even cared about the inconsistency.

Crew Rando

The “other” Picard, of course!

Distance Rating: 5K

IMDb score: 7.6/10

Top 5 Albums of 2012: The Contenders

It’s that time of year again. Looking back through my library, I am reaffirming what I observed when I checked out The Current’s Top 89 of 2012 polling the other day: I really have not been following new music this year.

I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve been much more wrapped up in my business, too busy making my own music (currently working on my third full-length album of the year), or just disinterested in what I’m hearing on the airwaves, but the numbers don’t lie: in 2011 I bought about 50 new albums. This year the number is around 20.

In the past I have eschewed self-published albums here, but as the quality of self-published music increases, and the barriers to self-publication fall with new Internet tools, the idea of signed acts being of inherently higher quality than indie stuff is more ludicrous than ever (and, truly, it always was). I’m still considering the vanity factor and leaving my own albums out of the running, but there’s some other great indie stuff I need to put on equal footing with the kinds of music you can buy on CD at Target or Best Buy. I’m also eliminating my previous restrictions against EPs and live albums, if for no other reason than to pad out this list just a bit.

So, here’s the list. The top 5 itself will be selected from this esteemed group of artists and albums:

  • Absinthe & The Dirty Floors: Side 2
  • Aimee Mann: Charmer
  • Air: Le voyage dans la lune
  • Andre LaFosse: Do the Math
  • Andre LaFosse: The Hard Bargain
  • another cultural landslide: last days last days
  • The Beach Boys: That’s Why God Made the Radio
  • Ben Folds Five: The Sound of the Life of the Mind
  • Coheed and Cambria: The Afterman: Ascension
  • Com Truise: In Decay
  • The Darcys: AJA
  • Donald Fagen: Sunken Condos
  • Field Music: Plumb
  • Grizzly Bear: Shields
  • Muse: The 2nd Law
  • Pinback: Information Retrieved
  • Return to Forever: The Mothership Returns (Live)
  • Rush: Clockwork Angels
  • The Shins: Port of Morrow
  • The Shiny Lights: Morocco

OK, I can be honest and knock a few contenders out right now: there is no way That’s Why God Made the Radio or The Sound of the Life of the Mind will make the list.

This new effort from the Beach Boys is surprising mainly in that it doesn’t completely suck like I expected it to. No, the main reason it’s surprising is that Brian Wilson and Mike Love managed tolerate each other long enough to finish the album (but not the tour). But that shock aside, there are a couple of outstanding tracks, along with a couple of truly appalling ones. (All of which were written by Brian Wilson; the rest are merely mediocre and pointless.)

The Ben Folds Five album is certainly my biggest disappointment of the year though. I’m not sure why, though I suspect it’s mainly just that in the decade-plus since the band’s previous album, my musical interests and those of Mr. Folds have gone in exact opposite directions. Either that or he’s just become a humorless middle-aged hack musical competition judge. Or both. (Full disclosure: I haven’t even listened to the entire album yet. Much like with the last two Phish studio albums, I just can’t do it.)

I’m also going to eliminate the Muse and Coheed and Cambria albums. I just haven’t listened to them enough to be able to judge them properly, but I suppose my lack of enthusiasm for them says enough anyway.

What do Made-in-USA iMacs, fracking in North Dakota, and right-to-work in Michigan have in common?

Yesterday I blogged about the huge glowing area in North Dakota that is experiencing a shale oil boom thanks to hydraulic fracturing (fracking). This morning I tweeted about new legislation passed to make Michigan a right-to-work state. And for the past few days I’ve been reading enthusiastic news that Apple is resuming manufacturing in the United States.

What do these things all have in common? Well… the always insightful Jason Kottke has the answer.

We’re witnessing an interesting cycle in the US economy right now. Changes in China in recent years have presented new challenges to its burgeoning manufacturing base; meanwhile here in the US the combination of Great Recession-related unemployment, the GOP’s 30-year experiment in rolling back labor rights, and (as Kottke notes) the artificially low price of natural gas here due to the fracking boom, have suddenly made the United States a much more desirable place for manufacturing. But will it last, and at what cost?

Deuce

I was never into KISS back when it was “cool” to be into KISS. I never had any of their records as a kid, no lunchbox or any other merchandise. Yet somewhere along the way (specifically, it was on a Minneapolis public access channel in late 1998 — I remember because it was during the month after I had moved back to Minneapolis from California but SLP had not yet joined me) I saw this old clip of them performing “Deuce” live in 1975 and was strangely captivated by it. I think it’s the synchronized head-bobbing thing Gene and Paul do starting at around 1:53 in this clip. Ridiculous, yet infectious: that’s the magic of KISS.

I was listening to some KISS this morning (I have their 4-disc IKONS boxed set), and when this song came on, I just had to seek out the video I remembered so well.