Re: Plugins, libraries, licenses and Debian

[Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>]

Don Armstrong <don@donarmstrong.com> writes:
> On Sat, 06 Dec 2003, Måns Rullgård wrote:

>> In my particular case, a plugin must implement one or more predefined
>> interfaces.  Several implementations of an interface can (and do)
>> exist independently.  Does this affect the situation in any way?
>
> Yes, assuming one of those implementation's licenses is compatible
> with the plugin, or the plugin is written to a generic interface and
> thus is a derived work of the generic interface as opposed to the
> implementation of that interface.

It's worth distinguishing between a few different things "several
implementations" can mean:

- Multiple modules, each doing different things, using the interface
- Multiple modules doing the same thing, all using the interface
- Multiple programs implementing the interface that can use the modules.

If Måns means the first of these, my understanding is that that would be
considerably less significant than the latter.

-- 
Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333  9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03