License for Open-Source Software w/ Plugins?

Posted by Cliff on Saturday August 27, 2005 @11:32AM from the stuck-in-a-tricky-situation dept.

ThiagoHP asks: "I have developed MultiMAD, a rapid application development and prototyping for for mobile devices in my master's course, and now I want to share it with the community. It's written in Java and it has a plugin architecture in order to support different mobile device platforms (WAP, J2ME, PalmOS, etc). I want to give the freedom to anybody write their plugins, even closed-source, as long as the tool itself is not modified for them to run. This implies that GPL cannot be used. At the same time, I do not want any closed-source tool based in MultiMAD code, so licenses such as the Apache one cannot be used. Am I right in my assumptions regarding licenses? What license do you suggest?"

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LGPL by A.K.A_Magnet · 2005-08-27 11:37 · Score: 5, Informative

That's exactly what the LGPL is for.

Derivative of your code will be in LGPL, but code linked to it (as plugins or using it as a library) have no license requirement.

Check it out
Yes you can... by joto · 2005-08-27 13:10 · Score: 4, Informative

Here's how you word it:
This software is licensed under the General Public License (GPL), version 2 (see below for the full text of this license). As a special exemption, software plugins using the documented plugin API for this software, will be allowed to be distributed and/or run-time linked with this software regardless of their license.
[Explain the plugin API, or where to find the "documented" parts of it]
[Full text of GPL]