RE: [eclipse-dev] GPL'd Plug-ins

[Michael R Head <burner@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2003-06-09 at 17:08, John Healy wrote:
> Hi Dave,
> 
> I looked at that FAQ as part of my investigation but I'm not sure it's
> of much help.  Point #12 talks about distributing a derived work, which
> wasn't really what I was getting at.
> 
> I guess I could rephrase my question as:  are plug-ins loaded in such a
> way that the GPL would propagate across the plug-in boundary and consume
> the entire framework?  (from other emails in this thread, I'm guess that
> the answer is yes.)  Part two would be, does eclipse.org have any
> policies with respect to plug-in licensing?

Apologies for continuing this thread, but it would be great if this were
really nailed down.

Wouldn't this argument work against _all_ java applications (indeed,
even against calling any application via exec() from within another
application, if you follow the argument to an extreme), since calling
'java YourClass' implies that the the java executable will load
YourClass and call the main method on it? I guess I just don't see how
distributing a GPL plugin is any different from distributing a GPL java
application (for the purposes of this argument). 

Talk to your legal department and get back to us! I'm sure someone at
Redhat would know about this sort of thing ;-) I guess pam is
dual-licensed to take care of this, but what about GPL apache modules?

mike

> 
> John
-- 
Michael R Head <burner@xxxxxxxxxxx>
ZClipse -- OpenSource Eclipse plugins