Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Forking in software development can lead to tricky licensing situations (WordPress story)
While getting ready to do some more Wordpress
blogging, I came across a few critical terms.
I won’t restate all the arguments here, but it’s important to know what
a GPL (Global Public License) is, and what is is not, as explained by Lawrence
Rosen on Sitepoint here. This is related to a practice in
software development called “forking”, explained in Wikipedia here. All of this came out of some WordPress (“WP
Tavern”) news about a DMCA Takedown notice associated with WordPress Database
Migrate Plugin by Brad Touesnard, of a Github page hosting the plugin (story ). Apparently the Plugin had used a
copyrighted documentation (README) file without permission, in a way that did
not affect the product.
All of this is pretty complicated, and will make
software developers wary.
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