The world of Worpdress plugins and themes is diverse...and heavily commercialized. You can't swing a bat without finding paid plugins and themes...and some of them are extremely pricey. This industry isn't a real one, though, and exists in the shadow of legal intimidation, enterprise laziness, and license confusion. The end result is a Wordpress ecosystem that's more limiting, confusing, and scammy.

Wait...Plugins are Free Software...?

Yes. All Wordpress plugins and themes are free software because as part of the Wordpress platform, they inherit the GPL 2 license. There's no getting around this legal certainty, although I'm not a lawyer so don't take this as legal advice. Have you ever wondered why Wordpress plugins don't "turn off" if you refuse to pay the yearly or monthly fees? Well, there's truly nothing preventing anyone from taking the plugin source code, forking it, and removing your annoying pay wall.

Every premium plugin you've ever bought could be uploaded to github and given away for free with impunity. That's how the GPL 2 license works. Don't believe me? Check some popular paid plugins or themes. Most will clearly reflect the GPL 2 license. Those that don't wouldn't have much ground to assert their claims in court.

Want more clarity? Wordpress itself strongly feels that plugins are covered by the GNU license and encourages you to use something else if you don't like that.

Why do Wordpress Plugins Cost so Much...?

To an enterprise, $200 a year (or hell, a month) is pretty much a steal. It's nothing. Enterprises are not going to dig into licensing terms. If a product page says that you need to buy something in order to install a plugin on more than one site, they simply will. The implication that there's some legal consequence for not following these "terms" is enough...even though it's complete bullshit.

Pirating a Wordpress plugin isn't actually illegal. It's legal to redistribute GPL 2 licensed software so long as you preserve the license. Installing that pirating plugin and refusing to pay the authors isn't illegal, either. Is it ethical, though? I would argue it is.

Wordpress was always meant to be open source, created in 2003 from a fork of its precursor, b2/cafelog. It became popular in part because competitor Movable Type changed its terms in 2004, an popular idea among its users. The popularity of the free and open source model speaks for itself...sort of.

Really, the market for WP plugins and themes shows how the idea of an open web doesn't always work the way people imagine it should.

How Open Source Fails

With nearly half the Internet supposedly running Wordpress (by number of domains, not by traffic obviously), Wordpress is a commodity. While the GNU license has plenty of terms, there's caveats...and because Wordpress became such a commodity, those caveats are "exploited" by commercial developers to create a market where arguably one wasn't supposed to even exist.

You are allowed to charge for software, even if it falls under the GPL 2 license. Nothing will stop people from distributing it -- in theory, one user could purchase it and give it away to everyone else without consequence. In reality, though, the legal frameworks already engulfing every facet of our life makes it unlikely that people will think to challenge the notion of a "pricing" page that limits how you can use the software that's actually free.

Why do you think so many plugins charge per year?

They know that people don't pay, that they don't have to pay, and that legally...there's no way they can make them pay for free software. This is a business of fear where fees are scooped up because people fear having the software turn off or that they might *gasp* be branded pirates for not paying these periodic ransoms. The victims are smaller businesses and individuals who can't use (often terrible) software because its gated behind a paywall.

I wish Wordpress would make it more clear that this is not how the Wordpress was "supposed" to work, that this isn't the point of the GPL 2 license....but there's money to be made, after all.

The idea that someone could just start posting plugins and themes online or allow users to share the is a nice one, but it isn't that simple to compete with established firms that spend a lot of money on SEO and advertising. Are you willing to defend yourself from legal challenges? The idea of being sued for distributing free software you are allowed to distribute per the license is stupid...but that's the world we live in. Corporations often want you to agree to every line of their terms and conditions, but then can absolutely ignore them and sue you when those terms don't work in their interest.

Conclusion

Some plugins are borderline scams. They have code to block access to "paid" features, completely abusing the concept of the license, which clearly states that every line of their software is FREE.

Yes, you are absolutely allowed to fork plugins, strip out the license checks, and re-release it....hell, even charge for it. Would you get sued? Probably, even though the license says you are allowed to do this. That's a failure of the open source idea and a sad thing about the state of Wordpress.

But hey, next time your boss tells you to just pirate some plugin, you actually can...and it's probably legal and probably more in line with the spirit of what Wordpress is supposed to be than paying for free software.