A few comments

[Eion Robb]

On Fri, 19 Oct 2007 11:26:01 +1300, Sean Egan <seanegan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
I know I should probably drop it, but I keep coming back to this page in  
the GPL FAQ http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FSWithNFLibs .  
Specifically the bit that says "If the program is already written using  
the non-free library, perhaps it is too late to change the decision. You  
may as well release the program as it stands, rather than not release it."  
Sure this plugin could never work in a Free world, but then neither would,  
eg, a Flash plugin in Firefox.

> 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.
Ok, I'm starting to see what angle you're seeing this from.  Plugins look  
like they're tending to muddy the waters a bit :)

Taking the example above with the Flash plugin for Firefox (yes, different  
licences, but hear me out :) ), the plugin itself relys on Flash and relys  
on Firefox, but is it illegal?  If it were, wouldn't Macromedia have been  
sued by Mozilla ages ago?
Following on from your example of aspell doing spell check for a non-free  
editor showing two seperate programs that run independently of each other,  
the same might be applied with Pidgin and Skype.  If you dont have aspell  
you can't spell check, if you dont have Skype you can't use this  
plugin/that protocol; yet Pidgin and Skype are still two seperate programs  
that can run without each other.

I dunno, this whole thing really feels like it could go both ways and some  
kind of legal addition to the license might help clear things up for  
everyone.