CloudCompare forum

Hi, me and my company are interested in using CC commercially. We did plug-in for robot based scanning system and we are happy with results. Now we want to develop more plug-ins working with the system. As result should our work be also released under GPL v2 as it is derivative work of CC? I didn’t change any of original CC C++/Cmake code.

Well, regarding the GPL licence, plugins are in a grey area. Whether they should also be GPL depends on the degree of dependency between the plugin and the main software.

If you haven't modified CC, and if you don't try to hide that your plugin relies on CloudCompare or anything, then neither I (nor EDF) will bug you about your plugin licence. The more people are using CC, the more stable and robust it will be (and if you sell your plugin, you should be more eager to help us fix it and improve it ;).

Regarding CC (not your plugin), you still need to be compliant with the GPL license: you should either ask your users to download and install CC themselves or distribute CC either with the sources or at least give them a way to get the sources (if it's the original CC version, then a simple link in the documentation to the official github repository is sufficient). Then as far as I am concerned, you can distribute your plugin as you wish.