Closed Poll: How do you feel about Discourse on TDWTF?
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I'm talking about plugins. Presumably any plugin that modifies things browser-side is going to interact with Discourse's JS, which means the plugin must also be GPL if Discourse is GPL because that's interacting at code level sharing a memory structure. The aggregation of code by definition must be GPL.
Can't the Discourse developers add a plugin exception to their license? GIMP does something like that, although GIMP also further separates the plugins by making them separate processes, which only need to link to LGPL libraries.
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That's just it, they wouldn't be separate processes at that point in time. There's just no way I can see it working in the current environment.
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That's just it, they wouldn't be separate processes at that point in time. There's just no way I can see it working in the current environment.
But can't they simply add an exception to the license that allows non-GPL plugins? Something similar to what all the projects that link with OpenSSL do?
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Then it's not GPL and not compatible with anything that IS GPL. GPL's nature isn't just about protecting freedom of software through guarantees, it's about trying to enforce everyone else stops being proprietary at the same time, one package at a time.
Look in the GPL FAQs, they're very happy about a thing called readline that depended on a GPL library and how it's a great case study of 'GPL all the things'.
GPL is great for enforcing certain things, and it's geared around a compiled application structure where extensibility is primarily handled at library level. Not so much for less rigorous environments where you're doing plugins at the source level rather than compiled/library level.
Could such an exception be granted? Sure. Is it a big deal that it wouldn't be GPL compatible? Probably not. But the more complicated the licensing terms are, the more likely you're going to push people away. GPL is well understood. GPL with a few strange exclusions (that are not compatible in any way with GPL itself), that's basically dual licensing the software. And that's always good fun.
