I woke up this morning to find I had a plugin that needed to be updated. Not a big deal. It was the cForms plugin which is constantly being updated. This time, however, it came with a special note:
In light of special circumstances, cforms will not continue to be available on wordpress.org. Future updates may only be available on http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin.
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That’s odd. This is one of the best plugins the WordPress community has to offer. Why would WordPress.org being pulling it down? Clicking further took me to the official cForms plugin site with another ’special’ note:
cforms has been removed from wordpress.org as a result to this post. Future updates may be released on the main cforms home page, chances are that support and further development will end with version 10.2
In light of the circumstances, the forum is currently closed (read-only), until further notice.
Being curious I had to see what amazingly terrible thing someone could have written about cForms that would have gotten it pulled from the mighty WordPress.org site.
Testing it out, I noticed a link at the bottom of the contact form. It pointed to Oliver Seidel’s web site. He’s the developer for cforms II. I didn’t like the placement for the link (my friend has a credits page where I would put it). So I immediately Googled how to do this. Lo’ and behold Mr. Seidel has deliberately made it difficult to remove the link. That’s fine. His software… sort of.
See, here’s the thing: All plugins on wordpress.org are supposed to use GPL-compatible licenses. That means that users get the source code, and they can do nearly whatever they want with it. Turns out that Mr. Seidel never actually included a license in the download (so far as I can tell). And on at least one page on his site, Mr. Seidel claims the license for cforms II is not open source or GPL compatible. Specifically, he says that users may not modify or redistribute the plugin or it’s source. That’s not GPL.
It seems that this guy was pissed because every plugin on the WordPress site must be licensed under the GPL license and cForms was clearly not.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this. I’m a big open source advocate myself, but plugins like this are major reason why I can comfortably tell someone to use WordPress and not some other blogging platform. I suppose this thing will die down shortly, but this is a bit of a blow to the WP community.
This also feels a bit Apple-appstore-ish. Why was the plugin ever allowed? If it was a small obscure plugin, I can understand. But just about everyone I kknow who is serious about WordPress is using cForms.
I also think this leads to a bigger issue of Open Source in general. This exact problem is something that could be considered the Achilles Heal of the OSS community. Mark Shuttleworth has already taken tons of heat for including code that wasn’t 100% open source in Ubuntu…but this is some of the code that makes Ubuntu usable by average people.
Will removing cForms from the WordPress.org site kill WordPress? The Community? All the other amazing plugins for WP? Of course not. But this is where the average user knows they can go and get good, quality plugins and install them incredibly easy (even more so with 2.7). This plugin repository is the iTunes for WP Plugins. If you don’t exist there, you don’t exist to the average user.
What do you think about cForms being removed? Who’s fault is it? The post author? WordPress for allowing it in the first place? cForms for not GPL’ing it?
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