[geeklog-devel] GPLv3

[Dirk Haun]

Ramnath R Iyer wrote:

>Out of curiosity, may I ask what was undesirable about the use of GPL for 
>Geeklog?

Were you around when we had the discussion about for-pay plugins earlier
this year? Effectively, the GPL can get in your way when you want to
make money from selling the software (as opposed to selling services
around the software).

In our case, the problem was that the plugin API is not a strict API, as
plugins will still have to use some global variables and data
structures. So they have to be under the GPL as well. And while you can
still sell a GPLed plugin, there's no way of stopping anyone from
distributing it then.

The Joomla! guys ran into a similar problem[1] and are now asking their
(commercial) plugin developers to re-license their plugins under the GPL.

I can't remember the exact details, but when we were tossing around the
idea of a commercial Geeklog distribution (in addition to the normal
one), we also ran into some license issues there. Other projects usually
get around this by using a dual license.

Not sure if that answered your question ...

bye, Dirk

[1] <http://www.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,105/p,370/>


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Geeklog Day at FrOSCon: August 25, 2007 - See you there!
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