Hello, I'm working a a plugin, and work harder on it. I've saw last time people saying their plugin has been stolen, and 'sell' on some server provider. My question are: In the actual state of my plugin developpement, I don't know if i will change the name, but can i ? How can i do with the licence to prevent it to be 'sell' ? I want to do the right thing. Source of my plugin: https://github.com/benda95280/PlayerHeadObj Thanks.
So if someone violates your license and sells it, are you gonna hire a lawyer and sue them (while you don't even know their real identity behind the anonymous online name)? We have no free legal services here.
I'm to looking for some advice to prevent it Like changing the licence. My plugin was based on the source of of https://github.com/Enes5519/PlayerHead/ I've done many modifications, and want to know if it's possible to change the licence of the plugin ? (When can i consider that the plugin is no more a 'fork' of Enes5519 ?)
Licenses are useless unless you go out of your way to enforce it. Unless you're prepared to pay for a lawyer when someone does sell your plugin, you're wasting your time. And if you are, everyone loses for no reason, including you and the person selling your plugin. In addition, it's not possible to change the license without the consent of all previous contributors.
To be specific, some licenses allow that, but the linked repository uses GPL-3.0, which is infamous for its "virus"-like nature where all derivations based on it must also be in GPL (or stricter).
In fact, licenses are there mainly to protect users, not to protect the developer. If you don't license your repository at all, people can simply do nothing with your code and it is totally your private intellectual property. Adding licenses is to tell people they are allowed to use it under certain conditions, i.e. to reassure that they won't be in legal trouble if they use the code, but not to protect the author (except disclaimers of warranties etc. are there to protect the author given that there are some users using it). Basically, if you don't mention it, it isn't implied that people can do it. Open source licenses are mostly created in the spirit that you want more people to use it more freely. They aren't created to inhibit what people can do, because open source was about freedom not commercialization or whatever restriction. If you don't want people to use it so freely, simply don't open source it. However, due to GPL restrictions, if you distribute a binary created from GPL-licensed code to people, you must also distribute the source code, so you simply can't bypass the license. But if you really made a lot of changes, why didn't you simply make a new plugin so that you can evade the license completely?