[Nagiosplug-devel] [Nagios-users] Licensing of Official and 3rd Party Plugins

[Holger Weiss]

* Andreas Ericsson <ae at op5.se> [2008-01-10 15:48]:
> Holger Weiss wrote:
> > * Thomas Guyot-Sionnest <dermoth at aei.ca> [2008-01-10 06:16]:
> >> Incompatibilities among GPL license are only brought by "GPLvX-only"
> >> type of licenses. Programs and libraries using "GPLvX or higher" will
> >> always avoid compatibility problems among GPL licenses.
> >
> > Which is why I prefer the latter over the former, but not all people do
> > it this way.  See the Linux kernel's license, for example.
>
> It isn't really an issue for the kernel though, as it's never loaded as
> a library.

The issue is using kernel code directly in other projects.  If this
weren't an issue there'd be no point in using an Open Source license for
non-library-code.

> >> GPL is meant to be incompatible with other licenses. If you're worried
> >> about that you should use the BSD license
> >
> > Yes, I personally do :-)
>
> BSD license has other issues. If there had ever been a perfect one, the
> need for a billion different ones wouldn't be needed.

*shrug*, I don't see the "issues", I guess the main reason the variants
emerged was to keep the lawyers of various institutions busy.  Well, an
issue I do see is with Berkeley's original 4-clause license, which isn't
compatible with the GPL, but I don't use that.

> >> but keep in mind that OSS wouldn't be nearly as strong as it is with
> >> BSD. Many companies contributing to OSS would just rip the code if it
> >> was under the BSD license.
> >
> > That's the idea of the GPL and in some cases it definitely worked, but I
> > doubt this effect is really that strong in practice.  My guess would be
> > that most companies which don't want to (or cannot) contribute their
> > code to OSS won't be forced by the GPL to do so, they simply won't use
> > GPL code.
>
> Or they'll use GPL code and have in-house modifications that are never
> made public, which is exactly what they would have done had it been BSD-
> or MIT-licensed instead.

Yup.

> For the plugins it won't matter in the slightest which version is used,
> as it isn't a library and so other programs will never have to think
> about it.

It doesn't matter for the plugins, but authors which like to use plugin
code in their projects would have to think about it.

I guess it's just me, but I've been bitten by license incompatibility
issues more than once, so I'm a bit annoyed of these.  However, I fully
agree it's no big deal for the plugin's project.  I should've kept
silent :-)

Holger