There are several different possibilities to implement a licensing / updating system. You can refer to this tutorial to build your own update server (as plugins hosted on wordpress.org can not be prevented to update by licensing). Building up on this is this tutorial by the same author on how to check for a license … Read more
I do so, using an licence Server. The Plugin / The Theme sends an licence-code (md5 on the wordpress-url) each hour to that Server and check whether the licence-code is valid or not (also get some remote Settings, if you have multi-mode-licences (Basic, Standard, Extended) or so) and if it’s not valid, the plugin stops … Read more
WordPress is licensed under GPLv2 according to their website. Answers to your questions, under the GPL: 1) Am I OK to publish my version of the code on GitHub/Packagist? Yes, as long as you keep a copy of the GPLv2 license with your released code. 2) If so, I presume I need to use the … Read more
You could use a combination of the file content and the domain to create a unique hash. Example: $md5 = md5( file_get_contents( __FILE__ ) . $_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’] ); if ( ‘be5d38f32a5d4a897e6c878f0c2f1b14’ !== $md5 ) deactivate_plugins( plugin_basename( __FILE__ ) ); Additionally, you could check each week per remote request to your server, if the hash is registered … Read more
You should ask your lawyer, never ask legal advice from random people on the net. Regardless of the legal question, it is rarely a smart idea to fork a plugin unless you understand that from that point forward it is your plugin. You can smartly use GIT to manage synchronizing when the original code updates, … Read more
Under the license it says: “Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.” This is talking about the license itself. You can’t take a GPL theme, modify it then announce it’s under the OMGWTFBBQ license. It has to remain GPL, hence the term copyleft … Read more
The official WP line is that if you want to share sell or distribute your plugin/theme, then the PHP code must be GPL compatible. This is because GPL is a copyleft licence. The WP project, maintainers, and governance follow the same interpretation of this that the FSF and others do, the same interpretation being used … Read more
It depends on the license of the source plugin. In case you’ve downloaded that plugin from WordPress Plugins Directory, then you can modify and upload it as it inherits the GPLv2 license of WordPress itself or GPLv2-compatible license of the modified plugin. Here are some guidelines. Also, it’s polite to mention the original author (“Inspired … Read more
Best practice for plugins which are not hosted on wordpress.org is to hook into the wordpress update workflow, and do the version check request at that time. This means that updates are being checked only when core decides that it is time to check, which usually happens at an admin page load once every 7 … Read more
You can use variations to set the different prices for the various licences, but that’s a lot of duplication as you’d need to enter the prices and attach the same download file to each variation manually. A better option would be to use the Product Addons plugin, which will allow you to attach any number … Read more