[LAD] GPL and plugins

[Chris Cannam]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 7:22 PM, Victor Lazzarini
<Victor.Lazzarini at nuim.ie> wrote:
> I think this is the closest to the scenario I am envisaging. There is a
> host, which is non-Free and commercial, currently using a non-Free plugin,
> which is packaged with it. This non-Free plugin gets substituted by a Free
> plugin, which is free because, amongst other things, it links to a GPL
> dynamic library. Is this breaking the original GPL license of the dynamic
> lib the plugin links to?

That doesn't seem like enough information for anyone to attempt an answer.

What do you mean by "gets substituted by"?  Do the distributors of the
application swap in the GPL plugin, or does the user who received it?
If the latter, how?  Was the GPL plugin written specifically to
replace the proprietary one?  Can it be used in other hosts?

My inclination is that the answer to your question is probably no,
this wouldn't violate the licence.  But the fact that you're asking at
all makes me wonder whether this is a situation in which the plugin
has been designed specifically to interact with a single proprietary
application, or a situation in which the host is distributed with a
plugin that is treated differently from others.  If that's so, then
it's possible a court might think that the plugin containing API code
was a derivative work of the host that implemented the API.

I'm not aware of any case in which this has actually been tested either way.


Chris