331 – Why pay full price when we have GPL clubs?

This is the 10th episode of our "Thinking the Unthinkable" series and today's thoroughly unsavoury thought is “Why pay full price when we have GPL clubs?”. I think to put things in perspective we need a bit of history. We tend to think of GPL clubs as a bit shady, but you could also argue that they serve as an essential consumer rights movement within WordPress. Let's start in the year 0. In the beginning was the Word. A few millennia later in the year 2003 WordPress comes along. It would not exist without the freedoms of the General Public Licence as it was a folk of b2/cafelog. It's build on the GPL and this allows for free use of code which sits on top of WordPress. But is this fair to the developers? Is it fair your clients? Are we all going to end up with malware infected plugins and themes which will wreak havoc on our site, or should we just talk a breath, calm down, and realise that this is all just fine? Find out what we think on the podcast today.