On Apr 15, 8:12 am, Benjamin Smedberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 1) If you distribute the flash plugin under a proprietary license
> independently of (Songbird), does it have to be GPL licensed?
>
> Absolutely not. The Flash plugin was compiled against tri-licensed headers,
> not GPL headers. By itself it has no license taint.
Agreed
> 2) Can an end-user install the flash plugin into Songbird?
>
> Certainly. The GPL doesn't limit what you can do with the GPL software. It
> only limits how you can redistribute it. So an end-user can install any
> plugin they want, as long as they don't redistribute it.
Agreed
> 3) Can (Songbird) distribute Flash with their application (assuming they
> have a license from Adobe)?
Not just Songbird... but can a third party (e.g. a distributor such as
Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSolaris, etc. etc.) distribute Songbird alongside
Flash.
> So... if you distribute (Songbird) on CD, and include the Flash installer on
> the CD, that should be ok. Flash is still an independent program aggregated
> on the install disc.
Agreed
> What if you archive the flash installer and the Songbird installer in one
> archive (self-extracing .exe, mac DMG, or .tar.bz2? Is this archive a
> "volume of a storage or distribution medium"? I don't know. The license
> itself doesn't define the term.
More specifically I'm thinking of the case for Sun, which distributes
Flash ("already installed" in /usr/lib/firefox/plugins) such that
Flash works out of the box for Firefox. We're wondering about the
legality of doing the same for Songbird.
> What if the (Songbird) installer installs the app, and then downloads and
> runs the Flash installer as a second step? I think this would avoid license
> taint, because it makes it clear that Flash is an independent program.
Agreed. But in the case for Sun which already distributes Flash -
they certainly won't take it out (thus breaking Firefox's Flash
capabilities, or at least making the user jump through an extra
installation hoop) on Songbird's account.
> > Is that the only difference? If we took XULRunner under the LGPL,
> > then it seems like an identical situation to the GStreamer issue, and
> > that we should be able to explicitly allow for the distribution of
> > Songbird under the GPL alongside non-GPL-compatible NPAPI plugins such
> > as Flash.
>
> Who is "we"? The Mozilla codebase is already licensed. You can choose to
> redistribute it under the MPL, the LGPL, or the GPL, but you cannot choose
> to redistribute it under the GPL + exceptions, because it isn't licensed
> that way, and relicensing it requires the consent of every contributor,
> which is... basically impossible.
"we" being Songbird. Let me rephrase since my sentence wasn't
clear... if Songbird took XULRunner under the LGPL, we wouldn't be
relicensing XULRunner (since, as you point out, we can't :)). We
would be relicensing the Songbird-unique GPL code as GPL + exceptions
(for GStreamer & NPAPI plugins).
This seems like the exact same case as the GStreamer exception:
* GPL app (e.g. Songbird vs. Rhythmbox/Totem/etc.)
* LGPL framework (XULRunner vs. GStreamer)
* non-GPL-compatible plugin (Flash vs. MP3 codec)
To be clear, I'm fine with either answer (I'm certainly not trying to
circumvent licensing in anyway) - I'm just trying to get clarification
since the GStreamer guys seem to say that GPL+exception case is okay.
Thanks for the input... realising of course, none of us (I think) are
lawyers - but I was hoping to find as much input as possible from Moz
folks before I go bleed myself dry on our lawyers.
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