If the government wanted to make a great investment in education, they could set up teachers with free server space with a control panel account. Meanwhile, I’d pony up $5/mo for a shared server account rather than agree to the TOS of any “free” hosted solution for my students’ use.

Paid plugins? Joomla had a big fight over that. I guess the conclusion was that it was okay. With Elgg, so far, people have paid coders to make extensions they want, then have given them away to the community.

I agree with your points, but have shelled out the bucks when I needed something and perceived it to be a reasonable value.

Co-Press users (I’d never heard of them before now) are similarly paying $65/month for the benefits of a hosted service. It’s up to Co-Press to ensure that the service is good so that customers stay happy and keep paying.

Likewise, Red Hat Linux do the same. You can download the source code for their operating system and compile/install it yourself or you can pay for a Red Hat license and they will do it for you in the form of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Notably, CentOS is a successful community effort to take Red Hat’s operating system source code, compile it, package it and distribute it for free as a competitor to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. GNU/Linux is open source (GPL/BSD/Apache, etc.) licensed, so they can do that and Red Hat operate successfully on the understanding of that.

Removing WordPress attribution from the footer is not (as far as I am aware) in violation of the GPL. What is in violation of the GPL is removing the license information and copyright attribution from the source code where it exists. I imagine Co-Press are just commenting the credit out and not removing all trace of the author’s assertion of copyright. Attribution refers to the source files that you see when you open them with a text editor, not whether you display a credit in your footer. Most users of binary open source products are never made aware of who actually owns the copyright to the source code.

Sorry if you’re aware of any of this. It’s more for the benefit of the thread than directed entirely at you

See, they are only charging a set up fee that pertains directly to the wp install, so the ($65 monthly!) hosting is what’s really being monetized. Still, their service stands on the backs of the opensource wp community- not only by using the software and plugins (like the auto-updating they provide for you?) but by claiming a benefit of using their service is that wp has a huge community of users and developers from which to get additional help from.

Further, their first project up and running removed wp entirely from the footer.

Itching over monetization is a necessary function of a free and open (word) press.

“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. ”

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