[Pipet Devel] GPL/LGPL issues

[Jean-Marc Valin]

> 1. Programs communicating by CORBA are separate programs, and so the
> license won't matter. It doesn't seem like this will change soon. So
> people can write replacements for any of the Piper parts if they want. Oh
> well, that was a design choice, right? I still think it is a good one to
> allow people to rewrite sections in a language independent manner. So we
> shouldn't worry about this.

You're right, the only thing I was a bit worried was that it would change in
later versions of the (L)GPL. 

> 2. Then I guess all we have to worry about is free versus non-free
> plugins. If we want people to be able to write non-free plugins that link
> with Piper, we should go for the LGPL, if not the GPL is our choice.

It's not as simple as that. You can link a closed-source program with an LGPL
library, but whether you can link the library (libdata-flow) to a closed source
plugin (library) is unclear. Remember that although libkdeui was LGPL, you still
couldn't link it to Qt when it was QPL (at least not within the KDE context). 

> 3. I think we should have one license for every part (as long as everyone
> can agree). This will make things a whole lot clearer about this issue.

Do you want "one license for every part" or the same license for all the parts,
it's unclear to me?

	Jean-Marc

-- 
Jean-Marc Valin
Universite de Sherbrooke - Genie Electrique
valj01 at gel.usherb.ca