On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 7:13 AM, Victor Lazzarini <[email protected]> wrote: > A simple question: can GPL plugins be loaded into non-free hosts? > This may appear a stupid question, but given the fact that non-free code > can't link to GPL binaries, what is the story with dynamic modules?
RMS and others within the FSF would appear to like this to be a complex question. It was always a gray area of GPL2, and originally GPL3 was going to clear it up before Tivoization became the main focus of GPL3. Your question is often asked in reverse - can a GPL'ed host load non-GPL'ed plugins, and I think that the answer here is extremely straightforward: yes, if the plugin uses an API which is independent of any particular host and only interacts with the host via that API. But I think that in the direction that you asked it then I think its a little more restrictive, with the same proviso that Chris offered: you as a user of a GPL'ed plugin can do whatever you want with it, including load it into a non-GPL host. However, I don't believe that the developers and/or distributors of the host can arrange for this happen in any "automatic" way, and would even be skirting a thin line by packaging their host with GPL'd plugins that would be discovered automatically. --p _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-dev
