[Qgis-developer] What's your view on QGIS plugins that connect to non-GPL software?

[Crispin Cooper]

Thinking on all that’s said here…



The idea that the proprietary link must be optional to ensure compliance with GPL seems to me a difficult one to apply at the granularity of plugins, because if the aim is to provide multiple different ways of doing something, the natural way to implement this is via multiple different plugins.  The overall effect then is that the proprietary link is optional in QGIS overall but not within that plugin.



Anyway I noticed there is an existing case study here in the Oracle Spatial Georaster plugin https://docs.qgis.org/2.2/en/docs/user_manual/plugins/plugins_oracle_raster.html



Is this sort of thing generally considered ok, and on what grounds?



Best regards



Crispin




From: qgis-developer-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:qgis-developer-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Tim Sutton
Sent: 14 September 2015 07:33
To: Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it>
Cc: QGIS Developer Mailing List <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: Re: [Qgis-developer] What's your view on QGIS plugins that connect to non-GPL software?

Hi


On 10 Sep 2015, at 23:23, Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it<mailto:cavallini at faunalia.it>> wrote:

Il 10/09/2015 17:39, Crispin Cooper ha scritto:

Hi Vincent, thank you for your reply.

The QGIS plugin would not be essential to the external process as sDNA works on its own anyway.  The external process would however be essential to the QGIS plugin.

Is there any sort of official position on this, e.g. from the steering committee?

Hi,
I do not think we have an official position: we stick to the GPL
licence. I admit that the interpretation may be sometimes tricky, but in
these case it's only a lawyer (or better a judge) that can give a
definite answer.
In general I thin Vincent has outlined the prevailing interpretation.

Yes the linking and licensing restrictions of GPL comes up many time but can be solved in edge cases - you might want to look at the (now defunct) SQLAnywhere plugin that was contributed (you will need to look back in Git history to find it)…they managed to find a way to deal with creating a GPL stubb that creates a socket connection to their proprietary db backend if I recall correctly. Marco Hugentobler has often said in response to these kind of questions (and I agree) that the GPL creates a platform that encourages sharing in two directions and when you weigh up the license against others in those simple terms it still seems like a good choice even if in some edge cases it actually means we lose potentially interesting contributions.

Regards

Tim



All the best.

--
Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu<http://www.faunalia.eu>
QGIS & PostGIS courses: http://www.faunalia.eu/training.html
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