[Bf-committers] supporting 6Dof devices on blender.

[Ettore Pasquini]

On 5/20/07 3:26 AM, "Jean-Luc Peurière" <jlp at nerim.net> wrote:

> Le 20 mai 07 à 01:02, Ettore Pasquini a écrit :
> 
>> Do you think the new license is still incompatible (beside the
>> advertisement issue) ?
> 
> The GPL is strict on what can be distributed in the same package as a
> GPL
> application, and this is one thing we cannot overlook. Only GPL and LGPL
> code can be packaged together.

That's fine. All my code (not the driver) will be open source, with the
license you best see fit. That's absolutely not a concern here.

The SDK itself doesn't add any binary blob at all. It just illustrates the
API available to talk to the driver, which comes with the hardware device.
The API itself is available after you install the driver. (BTW it's a
framework on OSX, a COM server on Windows, XEvent based on Un*x.)

The only piece of software that will contain calls to the 3Dx driver would
be the plugin, which will be dlopen'ed.

Regarding our driver API, it is available for Win/OSX/Linux/many Unices and
yes, it has a closed source implementation. However it is _hardly_ a
derivative work, plus we will be weakly linking to it. I'm not sure if this
is ok for the GPL in order to distribute the plugin with Blender.

>> Q: If a program released under the GPL uses a library that is LGPL,
>> and
>> this library can dlopen plug-ins at runtime, what are the requirements
>> for the license of the plug-in ?
>> 
>> A: You may not distribute the plug-in with the GPL application.
>> Distributing the plug-in alone, with the knowledge that it will be
>> used
>> primarily by GPL software is a bit of an edge case. We will not advise
>> you that it would be safe to do so, but we also will not advise you
>> that it would be absolutely forbidden.
> 
> So offering the plug-in as a separate download on blender.org servers
> should not be a problem.

That would be acceptable although not optimal... Does it make a difference
if the plugin is GPL'ed? As I said, we intend to make our plugin GPL'ed.

> Note that i'm neither a lawyer

Same here :-)

Ettore


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