Proper license for plugins

Stephen Pollei stephen_pollei at comcast.net
Sun Jan 16 19:01:36 UTC 2005


On Sun, 2005-01-16 at 01:47, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> It would seem from my limited research that the GPL is the most common 
> license used for open source projects. My (primitive) understanding of GPL 
> is that if you improve code under the GPL, you must release or offer to 
> release the source code to the improvement. Fair enough.
Only if you distribute the code. You are allowed to keep it "in-house"
without telling anyone.

> Obviously, if you write a program on the Linux platform, you are not 
> required to release the source code under the GPL just because it runs on 
> Linux. You could actually sell such a program, right? I assume people are 
> actually doing this.
True as long it just uses libraries that are LGPLed(or other even more
lenient license) like glibc or gtk+ or whatever than yes. However one
should note that QT, readline, and a few other libs are GPLed.
Also note that Trolltech will sell you a commercial license for you to
use QT in closed-source programs if you so desire.

> I would guess, but am not sure, that if you created a plugin for Emacs, you 
> would not be required to release the source code. I do not know if you 
> would be able to sell such a plugin.
Well I thought that emacs used a version of lisp. Does emacs lisp have a
byte-code? I use vi myself. Anyway plugins or modules that are not
derived, independent, and not shipped with any particular emacs may fall
into a grey-area.

> If you were thinking about creating a core environment that could be 
> extended through a plug-in architecture (similar to how Emacs works) and 
> you wanted the plug-ins to be able to be either open source OR proprietary, 
> would the GPL be a reasonable choice or is there a better license out there 
> for this purpose?
LGPL or GPL with a specific exception for plugins.
It depends on how much control you want to have and a few other things.
For a lot of things I do I only want very limited control so I dual
license LGPL and MPL(mozilla) .

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