[Qgis-developer] Plugin licence

[Even Rouault]

Le mercredi 25 mai 2016 12:03:58, Nathan Woodrow a écrit :
> >>I guess I am just sceptical that GPL's requirement for GPL licensing of a
> 
> product, purely by virtue of importing the first product as a library, is
> likely to hold much legal weight.
> 
> That is one of the main things with GPL and why a lot of people do tend to
> avoid it I guess.  Not much we can do for it now all plugins are GPL.

<my ow opinion, not pretending this is the project one>

Technically you could licence the plugin with any license you want, but as 
soon you execute it against QGIS, it must be compatible of GPL v2+, since it 
is a derived work of QGIS GPLv2 code, and thus it must convey the same rights 
and obligations offered and constrained by the GPLv2 license.
So you could also licence it under X/MIT, BSD 2/3 clauses or which ever other 
free licences that are compatible with GPLv2+.
It cannot be under a proprietary license, because GPLv2 would impose to have 
access to the source code.

The only cases where it makes sense in practice to have a plugin under a 
permissive license are :
- imagine that someone would reimplement a QGIS alternative that would have 
the same API as QGIS but would be more permissively licensed, then it could 
make sense to have your plugin under that permissive license.
- a more reasonable use case would be a plugin that would be compatible of 
QGIS and another proprietary GIS through some abstraction layer of their 
different APIs. The core of your plugin could then be permissively licensed to 
be compatible of both licensing models.

</my ow opinion, not pretending this is the project one>

> 
> On Wed, 25 May 2016 8:01 pm Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it> wrote:
> > Il 25/05/2016 11:42, Tom Chadwin ha scritto:
> > > I guess I am just sceptical that GPL's requirement for GPL licensing of
> > > a product, purely by virtue of importing the first product as a
> > > library, is likely to hold much legal weight.
> > 
> > We asked for legal advice, and that was the official response.
> > All the best.
> > 
> > --
> > Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu
> > QGIS & PostGIS courses: http://www.faunalia.eu/training.html
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