A few comments

Sean Egan seanegan at gmail.com
Thu Oct 18 18:26:01 EDT 2007


On 10/18/07, Eion Robb <eion at bigfoot.com> wrote:
> Perhaps libpurple needs a different license?  One that reflects the ideals
> of the Pidgin developers more?  Or an extension on the GPL to say, "no
> other software/program/library/toolkit that communicates with libpurple
> either directly or indirectly through OS calls, for the purpose of the
> shared use of its functions and data structures, may do so without being
> 'Free'" with some meaning of 'Free' to be compatible with non-GPL licences
> that are still in the 'spirit' of Pidgin devels?  If the 'spirit' of the
> GPL can currently be violated (in a GPL legal way) by making calls through
> another library, then lets make the licence clear and stop this
> happening.  It's your code and you shouldn't have to sit back and watch as
> it's used in ways you don't want it to be legally possibly to be used.

I actually talked about this exact issue with real lawyers a few months ago.
The takeaway, more or less, is that if something's being done solely
to circumvent the GPL, it's probably a GPL violation (violation of the letter,
not the spirit). If the free and non-free bits of code are fully able
to sustain
themselves on their own and have their own distinct purposes, you're likely ok.
I think the examples given were aspell doing spell check for a non-free
editor, or even gdb debugging a non-free program.

At the point where one of the two processes depends on the other,
that's where they become a single copyrightable work. In this case,
the code in the plugin depends on the existence of Skype. It's useless
without Skype, effectively turning Skype and Pidgin into a single
program.

I've asked them to look specifically about the Skype issue because I
have about a hundred threads about it in my inbox right now ;)




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