[Marble-devel] Re: Out of tree/non-GPL components?

[Torsten Rahn]

Hi Deepak,

On Thursday, 24. February 2011 14:55:20 Deepak Saxena wrote:
> components and one of the things we're looking to do is provide a
> method for developers to test certain navigation and Location
> Based Service components. I've been looking at Marble a bit and
> it seems like a really good fit due the plug-in architecture which
> allows different routing, map provider, and paint plugins. 

Sounds Great!  We are very interested in hearing more about 
your experience with using Marble and its library. :-)

> 1) What is the viability of developing plugins as standalone
>    components outside the Marble source tree? I'm imagining
>    somethinig similar to building out-of-tree kernel modules.
>    If this is not doable right now, what is the interest
>    level in this being supported? I may be able to get some
>    cycles to go work on this.

I guess it shouldn't be too hard to get this going. I haven't tried this 
myself yet but I don't see any major obstacles. I guess 
you just need to try it and it would be extremely valuable if you 
could create some documentation and/or provide some 
required code changes where possible. :-)

> 2) Some, if not all, of the routing and other components that
>    will need to be testing are likely to be of a propietary
>    nature so a plug in would act as a bridge between Marble
>    and the non-GPL lower level routing or map data engine,
>    likely through an IPC mechanism as run-time linking would
>    obviously be a GPL violation. 

Wait! You don't need to go through this pain! Marble is not licensed under the 
GPL. It's source code is fully licensed under the LGPL ! So you are perfectly
allowed to create a proprietary plugin and you can link against the Marble 
library (as long as you otherwise respect the terms of the LGPL license). Only 
remember that if you touch existing LGPL code or if you enhance it then you 
need to publish and contribute back your changes according to the LGPL!

Best Regards,

Torsten Rahn

>    I'd like to check in with
>    the community about the prior approach too as my intention
>    is not to abuse the work that has been done and stay
>    in line with community guidelines. Is a plug-in that
>    bridges to a propietary implemntation acceptable?
> 
> ~Deepak