[Geany] Common SVN repository for plugins

[Enrico Tröger]

On Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:42:59 +0100, Tim Tassonis <timtas at cubic.ch>
wrote:

> Jeff Pohlmeyer wrote:
> > On Jan 2, 2008 6:09 PM, John Gabriele <jmg3000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Another small nit I have is with the "or any later version" clause
Me too. This came from a template I used when starting to write Geany
using Anjuta. At this point, I didn't thought about publishing the code
at all and so I didn't thought about the licence problem.
OTOH, I recently read an article about the GPLv2 vs. GPLv3 problem and
the author(a German lawyer) mentioned it isn't applicable in this case
because an user can't agree to a licence or contract which isn't
already known or even written.
The easiest thing would be to remove this phrase but are we allowed to?

> > in the Geany license - somehow the idea of agreeing to enter into
> > a contract that hasn't been written yet doesn't seem to me like a
> > very wise thing to do. What if GPL-v4 says: "the author agrees to
> > pay all users of this software $1000 USD per bug report" , well, I
> > don't think I want to give users the option of choosing THAT
> > version :-)
> 
> I would think that a plugin may well have a different license than 
> geany, as it is not a derivative work of geany. How about starting an 
> endless discussion about derivative works as the linux kernel modules 
> discussion ;-) There, the last word from Linus seems to be: A module
> is _not_ a derivative work, so the author can choose the license
> freely.
> 
> But of course Enrico would be the one to ask, no me.
Or a lawyer who I'm not.
Besides any lethal considerations which I don't know, in my opinion the
choice of the licence of plugins is independent from Geany's licence as
long as it is compatible with GPLv2. I.e. a plugin can't choose a
closed-source licence because it uses code from Geany which is licenced
under the GPLv2. In order to so Geany would have been licenced under
the LGPL. I'm not completely sure about this but just publish your
plugin sources and all should be fine ;-).

But I suggest any further discussion on this topic should be done in a
new thread.

Regards,
Enrico

-- 
Get my GPG key from http://www.uvena.de/pub.key

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