QUESTION What are the risks of working freelancing with nulled scripts?

[xCrow]

I live in a 3rd world country, web development agencies are expensive and websites are mostly ugly old fashioned and developed by overpaid, underqualified devs. so I thought
I'd use nulled scripts to create better / cheaper websites for young entrepreneurs and local business owners to make a quick buck.

I wanted to ask how likely it is for this to backfire, for the original developers of the scripts to know and sue for infringement. the clients would mostly be local business owners, young entrepreneurs who operate locally in an a 3rd world country that still has strict rules about international payment and doesn't facilitate it.

I wanted to ask someone experienced that knows more about this than me or even tried something similar.

 

[flopas10]

If you’re talking about GPL stuff, then you’re basically fine.

The PHP code from Themeforest/Codecanyon/many others is GPL, which means you’re allowed to use it, modify it, and even sell work built with it. That’s literally the point of GPL. There’s nothing illegal about that, no matter how much some devs cry online.

You can see scary comments like "illegal" or "this is piracy," but 99% of the time that’s just devs who either don’t understand GPL or don’t like that it applies to them too. They benefit from selling on huge open source marketplaces and then act shocked when the rules work both ways. Legally, it can’t really backfire on you.

What can bite you is only practical stuff like updates for nulled releases being months behind on versions, or disappear entirely.

 

[xCrow]

If you’re talking about GPL stuff, then you’re basically fine.

The PHP code from Themeforest/Codecanyon/many others is GPL, which means you’re allowed to use it, modify it, and even sell work built with it. That’s literally the point of GPL. There’s nothing illegal about that, no matter how much some devs cry online.

You can see scary comments like "illegal" or "this is piracy," but 99% of the time that’s just devs who either don’t understand GPL or don’t like that it applies to them too. They benefit from selling on huge open source marketplaces and then act shocked when the rules work both ways. Legally, it can’t really backfire on you.

What can bite you is only practical stuff like updates for nulled releases being months behind on versions, or disappear entirely.

Very helpful, thanks because I looked in other places like reddit and such and they make it seem like it's some sort of unforgiveable crime where I'll most likely be caught and sued for infringement and that all nulled plugins have malware which never really happened to me personally but i'm afraid to give people malwares