Plugin Licensing / GPL Concerns

[nmbgeek]

I am not sure where the best place to start this discussion is and considered opening an issue on the fpp-data repo but I thought these forums might be a better place to start. Given that the majority of FPP and the components that most plugins interface with are GPL licensed my understanding of the license is that plugins would be considered a derivative and should be licensed with a GPL or GPL Compatible license.  There are a handful of great plugins and them not being GPL licensed is a concern from me for both a security perspective, project continuation, and general desire for access to modify functionality.

Some plugins add their own repo and download compiled packages for interacting with their servers.  After reviewing their repos there is no source and beyond that no license.  We have no way to verify the code being used and its security and if their brand new company shuts down over night the code would be useless and users completely without any way to pickup and continue development.

My suggestion would be for a plugin to be listed directly in the projects plugin list a requirement of that would be that it uses a GPL compatible license.  My laymen's understanding of the GPL license beyond that is that **if the plugins are considered a derivative work** FPP listing the plugins and providing the installation functionality that it does may also put FPP in violation of its own GPL license by providing the functionality that it does.

[dkulp]

Well, your initial premise is wrong.   The majority of the FPP "core" codebase is LGPL, not GPL.   That's a significant difference as it allows plugins to link with the FPP code without hitting the derivative restrictions.   For the most part, plugins that implement the various "Plugin" interfaces would be linking with libfpp.so which is LGPL.   That would be OK. 

[nmbgeek]

Thanks for the response Daniel.  Makes sense and after re-reading the license file I see that.