A few comments

[Ka-Hing Cheung]

On Fri, 2007-10-19 at 19:00 +1300, Eion Robb wrote:
> > Note that Pidgin is *not* written using a non-free library.  This is
> > not relevant.  You would be attempting to apply this retroactively to
> > established Free software, not to new software which has never been
> > licensed, which is what the above text concerns.
> 
> Whoops,  I wasn't meaning to talk about Pidgin, just the plugin I'm
> writing.  It's just that a plugin is a licensing derivative of the program
> it's a plugin for, and I'm getting confused between my programs :)
> 
> Here's my train of logic:
> Someone said I was using Skype as a library, and since that is not free,
> its a violation of the GPL.  If that were the case, why would the GPL FAQ
> talk about linking with non-free libraries as a possible (though not
> desirable) thing?

It depends on what "derivative" means, I think. A Pidgin plugin is
clearly a derivative of Pidgin, and as such must be bounded to the terms
of Pidgin. However, when you are writing some other application, you get
to choose the license, and as such you may be able to link to other
non-free libraries if they don't have GPL-like derivative requirements.

-khc