> > What I am suggesting is something below the GPL'd work, that does not > import from a GPL'd work. This neither depends on or links to the > GPL'd work. GPL'd works can import from non-GPL independent packages > without distribution encumbrance, but not the other way around. >
This is not official stance of Plone foundation: There have been recent court rulings in US (Oracle vs. Google about Android) and EU (SAS vs. World Programming) which explicitly state that APIs are not copyrightable. You may have heard at least about the former. Thus, Plone API may not be copyrightable and using it (importing from GPL) may not make your work a GPL derivate. Only if you distribute bits of Plone inside your add-on it makes it GPL. The case is very clear when you distribute Plone and your add-on together, but most of the folks do not. You could reimplement Plone API under license X and if your add-on works against this reimplementation then it could not be "a Plone derivate". Thus I found import argument very weak. We had this discussion already many years ago and "import from API to derivate" argument is not a clear cut. Some recent thoughts: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3251843&cid=41986577 -Mikko
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