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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