GPL licences and WordPress bundles - what's actually legal

GPLMart includes WordPress themes and plugins in the bundle - and people understandably ask 'is that legal?'. Short answer: yes, and it's the same licence WordPress itself ships under. Here's the honest explanation.

Why it's legal

WordPress core is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Plugins and themes are derivative works - they call WordPress functions - so they inherit the GPL. The GPL's whole purpose is that software covered by it stays free to share: anyone who has a copy may redistribute it, modified or not, including for a fee. That right isn't a loophole or a gray area; it is the licence's core design.

What you actually get

• The complete product files - identical to what the vendor distributes
• The right to install on as many sites as you like, including client sites
• The GPL freedoms themselves: use, modify, redistribute

What you don't get

• A vendor licence key or activation - those are a separate paid service
• Automatic updates from the original developer - updates ship through the bundle as new bundles publish
• Official support from the vendor's team
• Cloud features that phone home to vendor servers - some of those require an active key

The two traps

First trap: 'split licence' products. ThemeForest and CodeCanyon items use Envato's split licence - only the PHP is GPL; the bundled CSS, images and JavaScript are not. Redistributing the whole package is legally shaky, which is why we don't include those items.

Second trap: tampered downloads. Random 'free premium plugin' sites sometimes repack zips with injected code - this is a real malware vector, not a hypothetical one. Buying the product once from the vendor and redistributing that exact file is the defensible path.

What it means for you

As a buyer, GPL items in a bundle are clean, complete and lawful to use on any site you own or manage. What you're paying for is curation, delivery and convenience - not a licence key. If you want automatic updates or official support for a specific plugin, buying direct from its vendor is the right call, and you should.

Shopify themes, for the record, are different: they are not GPL. Third-party paid themes can't legally be redistributed, which is why GPLMart's Shopify bundle only includes themes we own or are explicitly authorised to distribute.