The future of Horos plugins
Joël Spaltenstein
This is a followup on the back and forth comments on github. I think it would be a good idea to get more input from the general Horos community, so I am posting here.
Horos/OsiriX plugin development is hard because there is no official API for plugins to target, and no contract between Horos/OsiriX and plugins with regard to what APIs the plugins can expect to remain stable between releases. So whenever anything changes in Horos/OsiriX there is no way to know what plugins might break because of the changes.
Now that we have to deal with a Horos fork and an OsiriX fork this has gotten even more complicated. Horos development is moving along, and OsiriX development is also moving along, although we are all blind to what is actually changing in OsiriX. Maintaining plugins for OsiriX has become pretty much impossible since developers don’t have access to the sources anymore, and making plugins compatible with both is becoming really hard. There is a question of whether to just drop compatibility with older OsiriX plugins. The direction things are moving in is to drop .osirixplugins unless that plugin specifically indicates that it is compatible with Horos (via an extra flag the info.plist). This would make things simpler for developers that only target Horos, and still give an option for developers who are willing to do a little extra work and want to distribute a single plugin that might work in both. I expect several of my customers who distribute plugins I have written might want to simplify distribution by having only one plugin.
I would like to hear from people that might be affected by this. Who uses their own custom plugins that might no longer with with Horos in the future?
Having to write and distribute plugins that specifically target Horos does bring one major legal issue for me though. Horos is GPL, which makes distributing non-GPL plugins a copyright violation. The Free Software Foundation, authors of the GPL, and I am sure we would all agree, a reference when it comes to legal matter with regard to the GPL, are very clear on the subject.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins
For developers who wanted to write applications that allow closed-source plugins, the Free Software Foundation wrote a new license, the LGPL. This exact discussion already took place with regard to OsiriX, which resulted in OsiriX switching from GPL to LGPL, so that authors of closed-source plugins could safely distribute their plugins.
These licensing issues may seem pedantic to a lot of people, but the details of software licenses are important, and not paying attention can destroy developers and put anyone who distributes software in hot water real quick. So, attention to anyone distributing custom close-source plugins for use in Horos. What you are doing is considered a copyright violation by the authors of the GPL.
Cheers,
Joël
Todd Jensen
Having to write and distribute plugins that specifically target Horos does bring one major legal issue for me though. Horos is GPL, which makes distributing non-GPL plugins a copyright violation. [...]
These licensing issues may seem pedantic to a lot of people, but the details of software licenses are important, and not paying attention can destroy developers and put anyone who distributes software in hot water real quick. So, attention to anyone distributing custom close-source plugins for use in Horos. What you are doing is considered a copyright violation by the authors of the GPL.
Joël Spaltenstein
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