Hello! It’s all good - this ACF/SCF thread is really interesting & relevant to me as all the sites I build are based on it 
Thanks - I might not need to, but all this kerfuffle could cause me and my clients problems so looking to mitigate ahead of time.
If I stay with the legit ACF there’s a risk they either end the lifetime license I’ve got and/or start gouging the price to please their shareholders, or even restrict it to their own version of WP.
If I switch to SCF (that’s included the Pro things) there’s the risk of Automattic ruining it (intentionally or not) or a legal challenge from WPEngine meaning they have to take it down…
I just want to build websites without all this corporate nonsense 
Great thread everyone, thanks for your input!
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Thanks for sharing this video; very clear explanation. Hijacking the free version of ACF was bad enough, but hijacking the paid version seems to me (not a lawyer) to have crossed the line into a criminal act. Mullenweg and, by extension WP, is out of control.
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I can’t imagine how WP/Matt wins in court, and I think it’s going to cost them enough money that ousting Matt to avoid further drama and stabilize WP is going to be an attractive option. I don’t understand the governance of WP well enough to know if that can happen if Matt is unwilling to step aside voluntarily.
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WP / Matt may well be out of control, and I think Tim (a lawyer) may be able to explain better, but my understanding is the GPL license applies even to the Pro version (you cannot change the license for a pro version). So from a legal standpoint it may be fine, but from an ethical standpoint or regarding developer trust, it is a shameful move.
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That’s essentially it. You could change the license if you could establish that the Pro version is really a separate program of its own, but I think that’s an uphill battle and, in any event, the change of license would have to be communicated clearly before purchase. I haven’t seen anything to suggest that was done, so it looks like the Pro version is licensed under the same GPL license as the Free version.
It’s like much of the Automattic-WPEngine dispute. It’s about how much was communicated clearly. Automattic says WPE didn’t make it clear that it’s not part of WordPress. But then others, including WPE, say that it was never made clear that the wordpress.org site was owned personally by Matt and not by the WordPress Foundation.
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I sort of thought that since the code interacts with WP, it would be considered a derivative (not a separate program), so even trying to communicate that you wish it would be under a different license would not make that be the case. It is a gray area, but in some respects the whole premise of paid plugins appears to be a gentleman’s agreement.
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That has always been Matt’s argument. As you say, it’s a gray area (because it’s never been tested in court), but I’m not inclined to agree with it because I don’t see where it could end. PHP is open source, so that argument could mean, for example, that anything written in PHP is open source too.
In ACF’s case, it’s now clear to me (having just downloaded and tried out SCF this morning) that it’s not adding any new functionality to WordPress, so I would agree that it’s derivative, and I don’t see any attempt to differentiate the Pro plugin.
Yes, that’s a great way to put it. I think most people (including those selling paid plugins) have never really understood what they have signed up to with the GPL license.
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It might not violate the law, but it certainly violates the trust that is foundational to the ecosystem. Were I developer of a paid plugin for WP, I’d be looking for ways to replace that revenue stream.
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Indeed. But it’s not that straightforward to do.
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Hi guys, just discovered the existence of classic press, thanks to livecanvas latest mailing. I was seriously considering leaving wordpress for statamic, which has extensive native support of any type of custom fields, but whats the options on classic press ? ACF ? SCF ? thanks for ideas and hints.
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Hi 
I’ve been testing out ACF Pro and SCF with ClassicPress and both seem fine so far…
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