[Qgis-developer] Re: import proprietary code inside a python plugin

[Carson Farmer]

Apologies for the messy email, I'm on the bus :-p But see below:

> 2012/3/27 Giovanni Manghi <giovanni.manghi at gmail.com>
>>
>> On Tue, 2012-03-27 at 09:51 +0200, G. Allegri wrote:
>> > Ops. How QGis can use GDAL which uses ECW?!
>>
>> > 3 - osgeo4w bundles gdal-ecw DLL
>>
>> I think there are no erdas libraries in the gdal-ecw package, it is just
>> a "bridge" (sorry if it is not the right term) between gdal and the
>> erdas libraries that the user must get and copy manually in his system.
>>
>> cheers
>
>
> Exactly, the same would happen with an LGPL bridge to ArcPy ;)
>
> *Forget Qgis for a moment*
> I create an LGPL library on top of arcpy. Stop
>
> Then, I release a GPL plugin for QGis that can import and use the above
LGPL library.
> QGis + GPL imports an LGPL library and ONLY USE ITS CODE. The GPL doesn't
import arcpy, nor use any proprietary code.

I think the question you have to ask here is this: does your plugin require
arcpy to function properly (whether via a bridge or not)? If it doesn't
work without it, then its a derivative work*... and since it obviously
doesn't work without pyqgis, which is gpl, it can't legally be released as
is.

Carson

* I'm not a lawyer, so take what I say with a grain of salt... blah blah...
>
> giovanni
>
>
>>
>> -- Giovanni --
>>
>
>
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