Paul Davis wrote: > If [ ... ] ***WE BELIEVE*** they form a single program, which must be > treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins.
Well, this is a FAQ, not expert legal opinion. But according to the FSF the intent of the license is that if A and B are linked together in the same program (no matter how that happens, static or dynamic linking, dlopen etc.) and B is GPL'ed then the combination A+B becomes a "derivative work" and is thus subject to the terms of the GPL. At least that's how I read the GPL FAQ. YMMV, but from what I've read in various discussions, e.g. at license-disc...@opensource.org, I believe that this interpretation is right, or at least the one intended by the FSF. No idea whether this would stand up in court. In any case, as a vendor who wants to distribute such a combination, I would either ask the authors for explicit permission or seek legal advice. > i don't believe that this is really the same thing. yes, this > definitely the point of releasing a library under the GPL. but > libraries are not plugins. No, but if your plugin is provided in the form of a dynamically loadable module, then according to the FSF it's to be treated just like a library linked into your program. It doesn't matter whether the linking happens at compile time or at run time. Otherwise a commercial vendor could just turn GPL'ed libraries into "plugins" and happily sell its non-free programs using those. That's surely not the intent of the GPL. Albert -- Dr. Albert Gr"af Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany Email: dr.gr...@t-online.de, a...@muwiinfa.geschichte.uni-mainz.de WWW: http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list Linux-audio-dev@lists.linuxaudio.org http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-dev
