[Dr. McKay]

If you want your plugin to be truly protected, write it as an MM:S plugin and release it closed-source.

That being said, depending on the complexity of your plugin, it could be trivial to hire someone to just re-create it in SM.

[Skyy]

More or less, I meant to say that while there is protection for authors, I think it's feasible for the license to be enforced; I notice that violators receive forum bans, but to my knowledge (if I'm wrong, my apologies) I do not believe anyone has actually been prosecuted for the violations (for sourcemod violations, not gpl in general) in any legal system, which doesn't really deter the violators.

I suppose a general example I'd propose is that of marvel and honorcode; While they're banned for being nosteam, it hasn't stopped them from coming on, downloading, and literally just copy/pasting a users work into their plugin. The most famous of them, I imagine, was when they directly inserted stryker's Boomer Bitch Slap plugin. Of course, you'd need to clean the code up slightly, or move the copy/paste around a little bit, but whether the author cares or not, there should be protection against that sort of behaviour, something that can be effectively enforced beyond the scope of the forum.

[asherkin]

We prefer technical measures, forum bans and blacklisting. In general, discussion generally leads to an amiable solution.

You're perfectly fine prosecuting for someone violating your own copyright (i.e. derivative works of your own plugins not following the license terms).

[Blackglade]

However, the problem occurs when prosecuting someone. How would you imaginably take legal action against someone over the internet. On top of that, when most buyers resell the plugin to others, it happens underground and you are unaware. We may never be able to protect plugins from profit, but then again we should at-least be able to implement a system in which we can find out when a plugin is resold.

[ReFlexPoison]

Originally Posted by Blackglade We may never be able to protect plugins from profit, but then again we should at-least be able to implement a system in which we can find out when a plugin is resold.

That is worthless, if a plugin is sold, the new owner can do whatever he or she likes with it. You are basically suggesting that we should tamper with new owner rights of owning source of sold plugins. (I've never seen so much greed)

[thetwistedpanda]

If you're selling an open source product, you're essentially selling the code, not your time invested or experienced gained. Whoever buys the code is essentially free to do what they want with it within the bounds of the license governing the source, in this case GPL v3. They're free to re-sell it if they want, since they bought the code. Sure it hurts your profits, but you don't write open source products if you're concerned with keeping code private.

[Blackglade]

fair enough..