On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 8:21 PM, Albert Graef <[email protected]> wrote:
> Yes. IANAL and all that, but the GPL is very clear on that, see e.g.: > http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPluginsInNF i would hardly call this "very clear" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Can I release a non-free program that's designed to load a GPL-covered plug-in? If [ ... ] ***WE BELIEVE*** they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. In order to use the GPL-covered plug-ins, the main program must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license, and that the terms of the GPL must be followed when the main program is distributed for use with these plug-ins. If the program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that ***IS A BORDERLINE CASE***. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (emphasis added) > In fact, library authors decidedly use the GPL (rather than the LGPL > which allows linking against proprietary software) to prevent > unsolicited use of their libraries in commercial software. i don't believe that this is really the same thing. yes, this definitely the point of releasing a library under the GPL. but libraries are not plugins. They do not supply an API, they use one. plugins are derivatives of a plugin API (which may also be a library), just as hosts might be. that doesn't make hosts derivatives of the plugins, which is quite different to the situation where a program (even a host) uses a library in a more traditional way. maybe the mathematical formulation is: is derivation distributive? or have i even forgotten that much of my high school math? _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-dev
