Charging for Plugins

Well I see a few people are now charing for plugins. serveral were uploaded here just within the last couple of days. As I see this a not conforming to GNU 2 which Redmine is based on and that its a requirement for these plugins to work! I feel it's just not right for the open source market. Yes I'm a developer that does give back to the commumity and I feel developer's have the right to get paid but when the work is based on the GNU I don't belive you should or can charge for it. The devolpers of Redmine are all volunteers so why should a person who wrote such a small peice get paid? I do have to say these plugins appear to be pretty good and seem to test a community version though.

I implore upon Jean-Phillipe to remove these plugins and the community to help identify those and that Redmine not feature or support them in any way shape or form!!

Replies (4)

RE: Charging for Plugins - Added by Jan Niggemann (redmine.org team member) about 12 years ago

IMHO this is quite a controversial issue.

If a program released under the GPL uses plug-ins, what are the requirements for the licenses of a plug-in?

It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license for the main program makes no requirements for them.

If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we >believe they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. This >means the plug-ins must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license, and that the terms of the GPL >must be followed when those plug-ins are distributed.

If the program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function >of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.

Source: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins

I don't know about the inner workings of ruby, but my feeling is that the second case is to be applied here (make function calls to each other and share data structures).

I don't like the idea of people charging for minor works while the underlying foundation is GPLed. On the other hand, if the work is more than just a couple of LOC...

What do the others think?

RE: Charging for Plugins - Added by Eduardo Machado about 12 years ago

I agree that these kind of plugin cannot be charged.

by the way, i do not like the idea to simply remove them from the list; a simple filter would do the job for comunity to ignore them if they think they should be ignored. ;)

RE: Charging for Plugins - Added by Anonymous about 12 years ago

I see two sides on this one.

I agree that Redmine's own plugin database shouldn't include these items. In fact, I think a requirement of posting a plugin should be linking to a download or repository, not an order page.

However, as Redmine is deployed more and more for enterprise scenarios, it's very realistic for some solutions to come with a price tag, but those solutions should be implemented outside of Redmine's plugin mechanism. TaskAdapter comes to mind, which allows import/export between Redmine and a few other tools using REST, and I'm pretty sure can legitimately come with a price tag.

So, yes, if it goes into 'plugins'--follow the rules. No order page.

RE: Charging for Plugins - Added by Harry Garrood almost 12 years ago

The fact that you have to pay for these plugins does not necessarily mean they are violating the licence. It's only a violation if the licence the plugins are released it is not GPL-compatible:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingWithGPL

So they're allowed to charge for it, but they have to give you the source code and allow you to redistribute it as well.

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