plugins with questionable licensing

[Mark Doliner]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 8:24 PM, Paul Aurich<paul at darkrain42.org> wrote:
> We became aware last week of two Pidgin plugins [1][2] that appear to have
> licensing issues.
>
> The dexrex plugin is closed source and appears to talk over a local socket
> to another process (based on looking at the strings output), but does not
> link against any other libraries.
>
> It was explained to James Toy (the person representing the dexrex plugin)
> that, as the plugin links with Pidgin, it needs to be GPL-licensed and he
> said he was going to work on that.

Great!

> Stu then discovered on Friday that the im-history.com plugins have
> issues.[3]  The Windows plugin is GPL licensed (source included), but links
> against "imhproxy.dll".
>
> What do we think the next steps to take here are? I contacted James Toy on
> IRC earlier today, but have not yet gotten a reply. Someone likely needs to
> contact im-history.com if we decide that there's an issue there (The linux
> plugin sounds OK, but the windows plugin definitely sounds like a GPL
> violation to me).

Yeah, one of us should probably send them an email.

Also, I made this: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PossibleLicenseViolations
I didn't spend a whole lot of time on it, and there's a lot of text
and not a lot of useful information.  Anyone should feel free to
improve upon it.

-Mark