Plugins (Re: [sldev] GPL violation?)

[Matthew Underwood]

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.
>

For the most part the GPL allows you to use GPL'd code so long as you
do not actually "include" that code into your binary with the
exclusion of language libraries (like the c standard libraries).  You
can make an executable around a library then pipe data between your
closed source program and the wrapped library, provided you release
the wrapper containing GPL'd code as open source.  You can get around
the GPL, by buying rights to the library from the developers (as they
still have the rights to it) or going through rather interesting
schemes, but it is designed to make FOSS easy and commercial (closed
source) hell.  The idea is that open source apps get a free ride while
commercial applications will need to fork out the dough (like they
normally would anyway).