Plugin Arch. for KDevelope 2.0

[Richard Dale]

On Mon, 30 Jul 2001, Sandy Meier wrote:
> >That would also affect the
> > development of closed source/need-to-pay-for applications/plugins for the
> > KDE desktop because an enforcement of opensource kdevelop plugins to the
> > producers of software implicitely would give them the message that they can
> > only deal with KDE by means of opensource/free software. That would be the
> > wrong message I'd say.
> >
> > Sandy, I see the good meaning of your proposal, but the thing is that we're
> > providing our stuff the way we want, what everyone else wants to do should
> > be their freedom. (free in the sense of free to choose, not free beer :))
> Ok, I understand your reasons and I can agree with it, but then we must 
> change the KDevelop license.:-( IMO it is not possible to write other plugins 
> then GPL(maybe BSD) based at the moment. You need to include the headers 
> (lib,sourceinfo,keditor,compiler options... ) to write C++ plugins and these 
> headers contain sometimes implementation and are GPL. For all this we need a 
> special agreement. 
I've been wondering about the licensing status of Java code which depends on a
GPL'd library. I would assume that you can write any Java source you like
using the KDevelop Java plugin api, as there is no implementation stuff like
header files linked in as described above. But on the other hand, any work
derived from the sources of the bindings for the plugin api would need to
conform to the GPL license. 

Java makes it easier to distinguish between using the api, and deriving works
from the sources of the code behind the api. To me, writing a plugin in C++
counts as just using the api, and not deriving from the code. The fact that you
have to include headers of source code to use an api with C++, is a language
problem - it shouldn't need to cause a license problem too.

-- Richard

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