Plugins (Re: [sldev] GPL violation?)
Argent Stonecutter
secret.argent at gmail.com
Sun Jun 1 12:52:19 PDT 2008
I think that it might be worthwhile to bring up plugin APIs, in
particular plugin APIs that could be used by commercial software.
There's a sticky situation here, because the GPL does not exclude
plugin APIs... only APIs that are shipped with the OS the software
it's running on (what could be called the libc exception, since
that's one of the big reasons it was originally created... to allow
GCC to be used on operating systems where it needed to use the
standard C library provided by the OS). The reason for this is that
otherwise you could use a "null" plugin as a general cutout to link
*anything* to GPLed code, reducing the GPL to the LGPL.
This in theory extends to Flash content on prims or in the in-world
browser, and to Quicktime (if you're building the GPLed client you
can't use the quicktime libraries because Quicktime isn't shipped
with Windows), and who knows what else.
I think LL needs to come up with some kind of explicit exception,
like the FOSS exception, for SOME kind of plugin API, or else
explicitly rule out plugins for GPL clients.
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