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RE: [eclipse-dev] GPL'd Plug-ins 
(sorry about the previous partial message - fingers slipped.)

I thought I had seen something related to this at one point:

http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/editorials/gpl_dynamic_link.html

  "Stallman says that dynamic linking isn't any different than
   static linking for the purpose of the GPL. That may be true,
   but an important issue is who does the linking. The link
   (static or dynamic) produces a derived work. But if the
   dynamic linking is done by the end user, he or she has the
   right to produce the derived work, even containing non-GPL'd
   code, provided that he or she does not distribute the derived
   work."

IANAL, but this certainly seems to be a reasonable interpretation.
You can write a GPL plugin, and distribute it, and end users can do
whatever they want with it; but distributing Eclipse + the GPL plugin
(a derived work) would be a violation of the GPL.

-Samrobb

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Orme [mailto:DaveO@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2003 2:56 PM
To: 'eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx'
Subject: RE: [eclipse-dev] GPL'd Plug-ins




> I've noticed that there are eclipse plug-ins available that 
> are licensed under the GPL (but not from eclipse.org).  I was 
> just wondered if, given the incompatibility between the GPL 
> and CPL, GPL'd  plug-ins are acceptable.  
> 
> It seems to me that the when a GPL'd plug-in is loaded, the 
> GPL would consume the framework unless the plug-in runs as a 
> separate program and talks to the framework through some kind 
> of IPC scheme (I'm not familiar with the details of how 
> plug-ins are loaded in eclipse, I really doubt it works that way). 
> 
> Can anyone comment on whether or not GPL'd (not LGPL'd) 
> plug-ins are ok form a licensing perspective? 
IANAL; IBM's lawyers have created the following faq: 
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-cplfaq.html 
From the faq, it appears that publishing Eclipse plug-ins under the GPL is probably problematic (see point #12). 


Dave

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