Plugins (Re: [sldev] GPL violation?)

[JB Kraft]

IANAL, but the unofficial FAQ seems to attempt to account for this usage

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Unofficial_Licensing_FAQ

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 3:52 PM, Argent Stonecutter <secret.argent at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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