plugins with questionable licensing

[Paul Aurich]

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.

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).

~Paul

[1] https://www.dexrex.com/download/linux
[2] http://www.im-history.com/downloads
[3] <&nosnilmot> in addition to the suspect dexrex plugin it seems
im-history.com's plugins are dubious too:
the windows plugin claims to be GPL licensed (and includes the plugin
source) but it uses what appears to be a non-free library "imhproxy.dll",
the linux version is suspect too - it is a perl plugin that talks some IPC
over a local socket to a non-free binary app


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