Re: Licensing for Nautilus extensions

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Alexander:

> 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.

Since this is a public integration point, it seems the documentation
should make this a bit more clear.  At the very least, it should be
documented that extensions link against LGPL, so a plugin shouldn't
be written with a LGPL incompatible license seems the sort of minimal
documentation that would be useful.  Should there be something like
a COPYING.PLUGINS file that could make this more clear?

> 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.

This technique would also be good to include in the documentation.

Just my 2 cents.

Brian