[gst-devel] Re: Multiple licenses and plugins

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller]

On Sun, 2002-08-18 at 08:32, Richard Stallman wrote:
>     Our interpretation of the licensing issue has been that it would then be
>     ok for people to use our stuff to make non-GPL compatible appliations,
>     as the LGPL allows, as long as they did not invoke any of the GPL
>     covered plugins directly or indirectly. Is this a correct interpretation
>     in your opinion? 
> 
> That is correct, in most cases.  If the plug-in is general purpose
> and not designed specifically for use with your library, they could
> make a valid argument that this is the equivalent of running a command
> from the hsell.
Yeah, that description would fit us well as all the plugins we made 
ourselves from scratch are LGPL, so it is only plugins based on 3rd
party libraries that will be GPL (even if we license the 'plugin code'
itself as LGPL).

> How did you choose the LGPL for the base library?  In some cases
> that is the right decision, but many libraries would do better using
> the GPL.  What job does the library do?
It is the GStreamer multimedia framework. The reason we choose the LGPL was both 
wanting a license that protected our work yet one that was open enough
to enable it to get us some convergence in the linux multimedia
landscape.
 
> By the way, the GNU Project is looking to establish direct
> relationships with developers of parts with GNOME, for them to be
> directly GNU packages.  Are you interested in doing that?
Not really sure. For one thing we do not mind people using our library
for applications that is licensed under a non-free license or even a
non-opensource license. (Even if we would prefer if such licenses where
used, for instance we use the GPL for the applications we ourselves
build on top of GStreamer).

Christian