Webcams, eye-candy and Phonon

[Laurent Pinchart]

> > Because a plugin is loaded into the codespace of the parent program, and
> > could be considered to violate the license of that parent program
> > depending on which one you use.
>
> 'could' being the operative word.

If I'm not mistaken (IANAL & co), GPL violation doesn't occur at runtime but 
at distribution time. Distributing a binary plugin with a GPL application is 
a license violation, but distributing a binary plugin on its own might be 
legal, at least with a GPL framework.

> > If you're working with a LGPL/GPL framework, contact the FSF license
> > team before putting too much work into it.
>
> i'd suggest contacting the affected project first as they may actually want
> to, as has the linux kernel team, provide exceptions. the FSF may write
> some of our licenses, but they don't write our code. and it's the people
> who write the code that get to make many of these final decisions (where
> they aren't precluded from doing so by law, of course)

Thanks for the advice.

> > Linus is just really lax about plugins and, I believe, ignoring the GPL
> > in some violations in order to promote it's useage.
>
> which is certainly his perogative.
>
> i'd sooner see kde bring more companies such as logitech closer to us even
> if it means allowing some proprietary code to be written and deployed by
> them rather than chase as many of them away simply because we are overly
> adamant about everything be free software -right now-.
>
> that said, this is really great news, laurent ... i do hope the kde mm
> people will be able to offer you some useful insights (mm really isn't my
> area of expertise). good work, and i hope your efforts with logitech
> continue to pay dividends =)

Thank you. Logitech will also be happy if we can find a way for them to 
integrate their products in the Linux desktop.

That being said, I'm still waiting for technical comments and advices :-)

Cheers,

Laurent Pinchart