cforms II does not use a GPL compatible license

POSTED BY Patrick ON June 15, 2010 / 0 COMMENTS

cforms is a powerful and feature rich form plugin for WordPress, offering convenient deployment of multiple Ajax driven contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page, but it is not available on the WordPress Plugin Repository. Why?

King Rat explains it best:

“I helped a friend of mine set up a web site for her small business. She asked me if I could install some sort of contact form for it, so she wouldn’t have to rely in people getting her email address right. Sure, she could use a mailto: link, but even then some people manage to mangle her email address in the process. She wanted something where people could simply type what they wanted, hit send, and she could be sure it got to her.

Since her site was built using WordPress, the first place I headed was the WordPress plugin repository. The handy-dandy integration between WordPress 2.7 and the repository makes such things simple. By far the most popular contact form plugin is cforms II (no link). So I installed and configured. Voila! A little complex but it wasn’t too hard to work with.

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.”