Re: Licensing for Nautilus extensions

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2009-05-20 at 14:03 -0500, Brian Cameron wrote:
> Nautilus Experts:
> 
> I have a co-worker who is writing a Nautilus extension.  He was 
> wondering if Nautilus extensions must be under a particular license.
> Since nautilus uses the GPL, does this imply that any Nautilus
> extension must also be GPL?  Or can any license be used for a
> Nautilus extension?
> 
> I have checked the nautilus module COPYING/COPYING.LIB/README/etc.
> files, and other relevant documentation [1], but I do not see any
> information about this.  Any advice would be appreciated.

We've never thought much about this. Extensions are only linked to a
LGPL library, but that is a very thin API that redirects to the
implementation which is mainly GPL. I think this means that the
extensions have to be GPL or at least GPL compatible, but IANAL.

Some extensions, like the dropbox one[1] are GPL but use some IPC
mechanism to talk to a non-free app. This is actually not such a bad
design in general if your extension is doing a lot of heavy stuff, as
running as a nautilus extension with all its issues (no sync i/o, no
control of the context of things run it, etc) can be kind of a pain.