[LAD] GPL and plugins

[Paul Davis]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 7:13 AM, Victor Lazzarini
<Victor.Lazzarini at nuim.ie> wrote:
> A simple question: can GPL plugins be loaded into non-free hosts?
> This may appear a stupid question, but given the fact that non-free code
> can't link to GPL binaries, what is the story with dynamic modules?

RMS and others within the FSF would appear to like this to be a
complex question. It was always a gray area of GPL2, and originally
GPL3 was going to clear it up before Tivoization became the main focus
of GPL3.

Your question is often asked in reverse - can a GPL'ed host load
non-GPL'ed plugins, and I think that the answer here is extremely
straightforward: yes, if the plugin uses an API which is independent
of any particular host and only interacts with the host via that API.

But I think that in the direction that you asked it then I think its a
little more restrictive, with the same proviso that Chris offered: you
as a user of a GPL'ed plugin can do whatever you want with it,
including load it into a non-GPL host. However, I don't believe that
the developers and/or distributors of the host can arrange for this
happen in any "automatic" way, and would even be skirting a thin line
by packaging their host with GPL'd plugins that would be discovered
automatically.

--p