Plugins and GPL

IANAL but reading the faq of the GPL

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins

It seems that plugins (because of the way they are invoked) are considered
a derivative work and must therfore also be licensed under GPL

If this is correct i suggest that NPL adds a clause to exclude plugins from GPL

Right, all plugins or any derivative works should be licensed under GPL. But I haven't got you about "If this is correct i suggest that NPL adds a clause to exclude plugins from GPL". Please clarify

Because that would mean that commercial plugins must publish source code and buyers of commercial plugins have the right to sell the plugin or give it away for free

No. Commercial plugins must publish source code only to persons who purchased it (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic)

Yes and the people who purchased a pluging (with source code) are then permitted to modify, sell and publish that source code. This imo makes it very hard to have a thriving commercial community around nopCommerce (like Magento, PrestaShop and OpenCart have).

Although I'm not an open-source licenses expert, you're right. But OpenCart is also licensed under GPL and still have a big database of extensions. Both magento and osCommerce use OSL but it's not compatible with GPL as I know. And futhermore nopCommerce uses several third-party libraries distributed under GPL license. It would be hard to replace them.

all the legalese is giving me a headache but I think it's possible to use GPL for nc,
use GPL libraries and have a commercial license for the templates and plugins.

Much like roundcube.net does: http://roundcube.net/license

code is GPL'ed with the execption of plugins.

keesjan wrote:

I agree with you.