Will it be illegal to use plugins that are licensed GPL in a server softwere licensed MIT?
I have a few questions:
1.Using Pore would it be illegal to run Bukkit plugins(licensed GPL) in Sponge(licensed MIT).
2.If Bukkit plugins where manually converted to Sponge would it still be illegal to use them in Sponge(probably not but this post is here just so people can be sure).
3.And finally if this post is supposed to go in Plugin Development instead of Sponge development I’m sorry i will change it 
!
As far as I am aware those licenses don’t say anything about what other licensed software you can use them with. You’d only run into problems if you wanted to use parts of the code in your own plugin with a different license.
After all, some bukkit plugins weren’t even licensed under GPL. Many were Creative Commons or even completely copyrighted.
So using Bukkit plugins in Sponge is legal but using parts of code of Bukkit plugins in any Sponge plugin is illegal. Thanks!
Well, not exactly.
It depends on the license the original code is under.
Many open source licenses require you to use the same license when you use parts of whatever their protecting.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think sponge requires you to license your pluigin with any specific license. Only the Sponge API is specificaly under MIT.
PS: Besides that, most Bukkit plugins will simply not work with sponge without some tweaks by the developer.
Thanks for the quick reply!
IANAL
And those plugins were explicitly breaking the license and thus illegal.
The GPL (Bukkit) license is viral (requires you to license anything using it under that license too), the MIT (Sponge) license is not.
On top of my head, the only two commonly used licenses that are viral are the GPL family (GPL is, LGPL is under some circumstances, AGPL is even more viral), the MPL (mostly used by Mozilla), and the CDDL (mostly used by Sun/Oracle, only reason for existing is being incompatible with the GPL family, for example so that Linux can’t legally reuse OpenSolaris’ ZFS code).
Common non-viral licenses include MIT/X11, BSD (modified and original), Apache, ISC/OpenBSD, and PSF.
I think the best solution would be to recreate those plugins in Sponge to avoid legal problems!
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