[xwiki-users] LGPL w/r/t plugins - are they derivative?

[Vincent Massol]

On Mar 12, 2007, at 5:57 PM, ahj at quantumleap.us wrote:

> Hi, xwikiites.
>
> I was wondering how you regard plugins that extend the capabilities  
> of xwiki with resepct to LGPL license.
>
> Do you consider plugins to be derivative works?  (I am assuming  
> that they are not already derivative in tthe sense of being  
> constructed on top of an existing LGPLed  code base)
>
> For instance  (purely hypothetical):
>
> Commercial developer "D" develops a type-ahead plugin that fills in  
> names of people in his office.  The system is so successful, that  
> he plans to market "TAXWiki"  - based on the xwiki codebase, but  
> with the added feature of corporate-aware type-ahead.
>
> Would the LGPL require that D contribute the source code to his  
> type-ahead plugin back to the xwiki codebase?

IMO, no. Same for Applications (i.e. set of XWiki pages).

As Catalin mentioned anything that modifies the current XWiki code  
base would have to go back in the community though.

Now what would be nice of course would be that such "D" developer/ 
company contributes back to the XWiki open source project in some  
manner (code contributions, support on the mailing list, donations,  
documentation improvements, etc) :-)

Thanks
-Vincent