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Are all plugins and themes, free and paid, in the wordpress.org directory or not, count as GPL?
Wordpress says plugins and themes are counted as GPL. Does this include all themes and plugins without exceptions or not? Can someone explain this.
My main purpose for asking this question is, is it 100% legal to use the GPL versions (nulled,cheap) for all plugins without exceptions?
(I am not talking about the morality of it. Not everyone in the world charges 2000$ for a website)
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Go Google search GPL. Nulled premium plugins aren’t GPL. All themes and plugins in The .org repository are GPL. Do with them as you wish. They’re open source and available to the public for free.
Nulled premium plugins are theft of intellectual property of their authors. They’ve been hacked or shared in a less than ethical fashion – these should never be used.
This is very complicated, since WordPress project has inconsistent and hand-wavy take on it, that’s not exactly legally tested.
WordPress considers all themes and plugins to be derivative works under GPLv2+ [https://wordpress.org/about/license/](https://wordpress.org/about/license/)
At the same time official plugins repository sets the rules at submitting plugins under “GPL-compatible” license [https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detailed-plugin-guidelines/](https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detailed-plugin-guidelines/)
These are mutually exclusive takes. Either plugins ARE derivative and MUST be under GPLv2+ or they AREN’T derivative and CAN be under non-GPL licenses (GPL-compatible licenses aren’t necessarily GPL, e.g. MIT).
So it is clear as mud.
Even when just following WordPress own 100% official docs, before you even get into opinions people have on this. And they do.
I would say the reasonable thing to do is only ever consider the specific license that a plugin or theme are explicitly provided with by its authors.