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Posted by Toby A Inkster on 07/23/07 12:35
Martin Larsen wrote:
> I deliberately asked the question in a simple minded manner as I did not
> want my own view of the matter to bias the replies. The thing is that
> the core team behind a major CMS (Joomla) has recently changed their
> mind about non-GPL plugins (or scripts, if you like). Until then they
> accepted and welcomed proprietary plugins, but now they say that since
> the CMS is GPL, the plugins must also be GPL to comply.
If that is the case, I think you'll find that the issue of whether they
are statically or dynamically linked is not particularly relevant: it's
tangential to the main question: are the plugins a "derivative work" (as
defined by the GPL) of Joomla.
My interpretation would be that if you don't use any of the GPL'd Joomla
code in your plugins, then your plugin is not a derivative work, and it
may be distributed under any licence you see fit. The act of plugging the
plugin in to Joomla effectively creates a work which is derivative of both
the plugin, and of Joomla. This in itself is OK as far as the GPL is
concerned. However, if you distribute this derivative work, the GPL must
take effect.
So to cut a long story short, if you distribute an installation of Joomla
which includes your plugin, the work as a whole, including the plugin,
must be covered by the GPL. If you distribute them separately (though
they may be on the same medium, as that would be what the GPL terms a
"mere aggregation") then the plugin does not need to be GPL'd. If you
distribute the plugin alone, it does not need to be GPL'd.
But IANAL.
Anyway, your argument to the developers should be that the GPL doesn't
cover usage -- it just covers distribution (GPLv3 term: "propagation").
If what you are distributing (the plugin) doesn't contain a single byte of
source code from the original work, then it's not a derived product, so
distribution of is not subject to the GPL.
If you want an argument that the plugin alone is not a derived work, point
out that you could have written it in a white room, with no access to the
Joomla source code, going by just the Joomla API documentation. (Assuming
that the documentation is up to scratch!)
--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.12-12mdksmp, up 32 days, 15:53.]
Parsing an HTML Table with PEAR's XML_HTTPSax3
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2007/07/20/html-table-parsing/
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