[Pipet Devel] license nominations

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Jean-Marc Valin wrote:
> 
> First, the LGPL only makes sense for a library, not for a program, so licensing
> the UI under the GPL makes sense (I think everybody will agree on that).

Well, that is another issue.  The UIL can contain any number of UI's that work
with Piper through CORBA.  Perhaps you're talking about Pied and Peep.  They
too may have plugins (UI-dependent widgets), which I believe would be treated
as libraries just like any GTK+ widget.

> Now, a bit about plugins... Actually, I don't want to use the term and only
> refered to it so I could be understood by Piper-unaware people. The term I want
> to use is toolbox. A toolbox is a .so library that can contain any number of
> node implementations. When it starts, the PL looks for all the toolboxes in its
> path and loads them all (with dlopen). What I'm afraid is that if dlopen-ing a
> .so file is considered linking by the GPL then, regardless of the license used
> for the PL, using a GPL'd toolbox at the same time as a closed-source toolbox
> would be illegal, since the GPL'd toolbox would be linked to the closed-source
> toolbox. The only solution I see if dlopen-ing is considered linking is to
> release the PL under a dual GPL-LGPL license, so that you could legally chose
> between having the right to use GPL'd plugins or not.

So, you're saying that

    Any licensed PL + GPL'd .so + non-GPL'd .so = Illegal linking

Can you give me an example of a non-GPL'd .so that you might want to use? 
This is something every GPL'd program has to deal with.  There are
limitations, and KDE exceeded the limitations, allowing the creation of GNOME
as a competitor.

Of course, this is not the same issue as wrapping a pre-existing program to
run as a node.  I think we can consider that to NOT be linking as defined by
the GPL.  That's what I've been talking about regarding license modifications.

Jeff
-- 
J.W. Bizzaro                                           jeff at bioinformatics.org
Director, Bioinformatics.org: The Open Lab     http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
               -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
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