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

[John Healy <jhealy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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?

John

On Mon, 2003-06-09 at 14:56, Dave Orme wrote:
> 
> > 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