On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 9:28 AM, jaromil<jaro...@dyne.org> wrote: > in a past thread (feb. 2004) on the piksel list regarding licensing of > video plugins, i've asked the FSF regarding this issue and got this > reply: > > "Legally speaking, there's never been a case which discussed > this. FSF believes that dlopen operates the same way as > compile-time linking." Dave Turner GPL Compliance Engineer
which of course is both correct and incorrect. the end result of calling dlopen() is the same in terms of code execution possibilities and pathways. but compile-time (dynamic) linking on any modern system creates unavoidable dependencies that means that the linked code cannot execute without the required libraries. this is not true of dlopen(), at least for the cases we are interested in for the plugin situation. ardour's code contains no references to any LADSPA plugins (or LV2 or LV2 or AudioUnit etc). it can, at the user's discretion, load and execute these plugins. if the user never takes an action that explicitly indicates that they want to use a plugin, then ardour will function exactly the same on a system that has the plugins installed and one that does not. i cannot understand how the FSF can possibly equate this with dynamic compile time linkage, in which the program cannot startup or function normally in the absence of the correct version of all the linked libraries. the problem with the GPL in this context is mostly that its unclear. ardour uses libfftw which is GPL'ed. does this mean that we violate the GPL license of FFTW when we allow users to load non-GPL'ed plugin code even though the plugin code doesn't use FFTW in any way? and if this is a violation, when does it occur? what happens if we create a "mere aggregation" of ardour plus 1 or more non-GPL'ed plugins and distribute that? does distributing that violate the GPL on FFTW, even though ardour has not been linked against the plugins? --p _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list Linux-audio-dev@lists.linuxaudio.org http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-dev