WordPress Plugin Review Team’s Stance That “Forked Premium Plugins Are Not Permitted” Changed Same Day ACF Takeover Happened
Since Matt Mullenweg announced a takeover of WP Engine’s Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) on the WordPress plugin directory on October 12, there have been questions if the features of the paid Pro version would be incorporated in the rebranded Secure Custom Fields. Doing that would be against the stated policy of the team running the WordPress plugin directory that was spelled out in a February 16, 2021 post titled “Reminder: Forked Premium Plugins Are Not Permitted.” Or it was against the policy. As of October 8, the beginning of the post started “tl;dr: We do not permit copies or forks of premium (pay for) plugins to be hosted on WordPress.org.”
That has been removed and replaced with a message that says “Update from the Plugin Review Team: This post is no longer being updated, so please use the guidelines and FAQ for any information you’re looking for.”
Looking at other posts from the same author on the team’s blog, they haven’t had that same message added to them.
Based on the source code of the post, it was modified on October 12:
<meta property=”article:modified_time” content=”2024-10-12T20:10:50+00:00″ />
The takeover post was published less than 8 hours after that less than three hours before that:
<meta property=”article:published_time” content=”2024-10-12T18:26:55+00:00″ />
The detailed plugin guidelines referenced in the update don’t include a similar prevision and didn’t at the time the post was published. Considering the guidelines are supposed to be detailed, that seems like something that should have been included in them. In the past, the detailed guidelines look to have been hidden from public view until November 2011.
The person who wrote that post is someone that has been problematic in the WordPress space in similar ways to Matt Mullenweg. Their explanation for the policy, which was that “Taking someone’s pay-for code and re-releasing it as free-of-charge is considered (by us — the Plugin Review Team) to be a form of piracy,” is directly against WordPress’ embrace of the “four freedoms” of the GPL. It was a position that received push back in the comments at the time. It did not receive wider criticism at the time, which might be explained by the authors status as being above criticism by high-profile members of the WordPress community. So invalidating that post isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the timing and the lack of public explanation of the retraction are problematic.