Bazaar Licenses

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Martin Pool writes:

 > The interpretation of plugins in Python is not agreed upon.

Sure, but Stallman's opinion (and that of his lawyer) is clear and
well-known.  If the only way for the plugin to do its work is to run
it in the same process as a main program, the plugin is a derivative
work of the main program.  You're a GNU project, that means that you
should accept Stallman's interpretation.  And any reasonably paranoid
lawyer (and Sean's lawyers are paranoid beyond reason, IMHO :-) will
fear Eben Moglen, even if his role is just amicus curie.

 > I think the main point here is that is that the requirement of the GPL
 > is that if you give someone binaries, you give them source and the
 > right to redistribute.

Please be careful about wording.  There are plenty of ways to "give"
people binary copies without triggering the GPL (see Michael Trausch's
post for examples).

 > If you don't publish the source, you can make any changes.  That
 > said we'd hope people will contribute back fixes so they can be
 > integrated in the main releases.

Indeed.  Note that (as long as the fixes do not depend on code or
patents you do not wish released) you *can* distribute fixes without
endangering your proprietary code.