Re: [Evolution] about project Ägypten

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Fri, 2002-06-14 at 07:24, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> It just traversed my tired brain: why don't you make an Evolution plugin
> with this GPL program, distributed separately ? If Evolution's libs are
> LGPL, they can link with GPL and proprietary programs, otherwise whole
> LGPL projects like GNOME wouldn't work.
>
> Technically possible ?

It would be if it was through a corba bridge (or pipe or socket).  This
stuff would best fit inside existing camel api's though, which means
(for practical purposes) it would link to it directly, otherwise it
would have to call it as an external program, and we can't use corba
because orbit isn't threadsafe (sigh).  Camel's plugin system, which
isn't currently used for this type of stuff, but which could be, relies
on dlopen, which is the same as linking to the code.

As soon as you 'link' with any GPL code, even at runtime, the rest falls
under the same restrictions.  As far as i can tell, 'linking'
essentially comes down to having code executing in the same memory/stack
space.  It is different if those libs are LGPL, but in this case they're
not - it doesn't really matter what license evolution (or its internal
libraries - most of which are GPL, not LGPL btw) uses, its what license
the external libraries it uses use.

You could, i guess, have a version of a plugin, that when you're using
it, you can't use stuff like connector at the same time.  But that isn't
really practical for s/mime since it should be available in that
envirionment if any.  Or, the plugin has an license exception clause,
but that of course relies on getting an exception from the (GPL'd)
library authors too, which probably isn't going to happen.

Fun?