Licence - Honest Analytics

What that means for you

You may:

Run the plugin, for any purpose, on as many sites as you like.
Read the source. All of it. There is no obfuscated or encrypted code.
Modify it, and run your modified version.
Redistribute it, modified or not, provided you pass on the same freedoms and the same licence.

The full text is at gnu.org, and a copy ships in the plugin as LICENSE.md.

So what is the licence key for?

Plenty of plugin vendors are vague about this, so here it is plainly: the licence key does not restrict your legal right to use the code. The GPL grants that, and I cannot take it back with a key or a terms page.

What you are buying is the service around the software: a build of Pro delivered to you, automatic updates through the WordPress update screen for as long as the plugin exists, and twelve months of support from someone who wrote it. The key is how I know which of those you are entitled to, and how many sites you told me you were running.

The activation limit is a commercial agreement between us, not a technical cage. Nothing phones home to check whether you are allowed to keep counting pageviews, and nothing switches off if a check fails or a server is down. If you buy Pro for one site and install it on three, the plugin will not stop you - I am asking you not to, because this is a small business and the honour system is the only thing between it and not existing.

The free edition

Lite is on WordPress.org under the same licence, with no key and no activation tracking. It is a real product, not a trial: no nag screens, no countdowns, no artificial caps on rows, retention or date ranges. If it does everything you need, that is a perfectly good outcome and you owe me nothing.

What's bundled, and under what

All of it is served from your own server. Nothing is fetched from a CDN or any other third party at runtime.

Chart.js 4.5.1 - MIT. Used for the charts in the admin screens.
donatj/PhpUserAgent - MIT. Used for sorting a user-agent string into a browser and platform family, before discarding it.
jaybizzle/crawler-detect - MIT. Used for identifying crawlers so they are reported separately and never counted as people.
maxmind-db/reader - Apache-2.0. Used for reading a local geo database, if you enable country reporting.

Chart.js is committed to the repository with a recorded checksum rather than pulled from a CDN, because a CDN is a third party watching your admin. An unexplained change to that file fails the build.

Geo databases

Neither is bundled. If you turn on country reporting you install one yourself, and it is read locally.

GeoLite2 by MaxMind - Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, plus MaxMind's own end-user licence.
DB-IP Lite - Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Both require attribution, which the Locations screen renders for you.

No warranty

The GPL provides the software without warranty of any kind, including the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. See the terms for how that sits alongside your statutory rights as a consumer.

Questions

If something about the licensing is unclear, or you want to do something with the code and are not sure whether it is allowed, email support@honest-analytics.com. The answer is usually yes.