Bazaar Licenses

[Martin Pool]

2009/8/11 Alexander Belchenko <bialix at ukr.net>:
> John Arbash Meinel пишет:
>> Usher, Sean (Sean) wrote:
>>> John,
>>
>>> I blieve the worry is that we may need to make changes and possibly add
>>> proprietary source code, and under GPL, we may be force to release that
>>> code to the public.
>>
>>> Sean
>>
>>
>> I'll note that Bazaar has a pretty good plugin system, which allows a
>> lot of customization without actually modifying the core of bzr.
>
> But IIUC all plugins should have GPL license as well, because they are used GPL bzrlib, and based on
> the GPL basis it means they're also become GPL code?
>
> Or there is some explicit exclusion for it? Maybe bzrlib itself will be better to have licensed
> under LGPL?

The interpretation of plugins in Python is not agreed upon.

I don't think it would be in the spirit of the GPL on Bazaar to
publish non-free plugins that hook into internals.  I think that
things like xmloutput that make bzr run as a separate process
underneath some other program are fine.

I don't think John was suggesting plugins as a workaround for
licensing but rather as a technically clean way to do site-specific
policy.

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.  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.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>