Re: [Gaim-devel] Re: Gaim-Encryption plugin violates Gaim's license#
On Mon, 2003-06-02 at 15:28, Robert McQueen wrote:
> My concern is that even if you distribute
> in source form, you're still condoning ignoring part of Gaim's license,
> which seems highly dubious. So as well as saying "Debian will never ship
> this" as a Debian developer, I was also saying "please do not encourage
> your users to ignore our license" as a Gaim contributor. I'd favour that
> Gaim-Encryption isn't included by distributors at all until it is
> reworked to use GNUTLS as Bill has so kindly agreed to do, hopefully
> within the next 2 or 3 weeks.
"If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls
to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single
program, so plug-ins must be treated as extensions to the main program.
This means they must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free
software license, and that the terms of the GPL must be followed when
those plug-ins are distributed."
--http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins
This indicates that the plugin must be released by terms of the GPL (or
GPL-compatible) license. Obviously now it is not GPL-compatible,
regardless of whether it's distributed as source or as binaries. Don't
feel compelled to remove your plugin; as long as you're actively working
to resolve these issues, I wouldn't worry too much about 29 little
words.
-s.
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