[Paraview-developers] How to public a plugin and include it in the official Paraview distribution

[David Thompson]

Hi Andrea,

> ...
> I'm developing a Paraview plugin for an university project (in collaboration with the Prof. Paolo Cignoni) which includes key features of the VCG library (actually Uniform Random Sampling and the Hausdorff Distance computation).
> 
> I'd would asking you about the steps to public my plugin and some develop tips to include it in the official distribution. ...

I would be happy to take a look at your contribution, but if it depends on VCG then I do not think it can be included in ParaView directly because of licensing issues. My understanding is that VCG is licensed under the GPL while ParaView is licensed under a less restrictive BSD-style license. We specifically require conributions to the VTK and ParaView repositories to be under the BSD license and not depend on software under the GPL so that PV+VTK can be used in closed-source commercial applications.

However, we do provide pathways for software under other licenses to be integrated into VTK and ParaView, including remote source modules[1] and plugins[2]. This way, people willing to accept the GPL can use your contribution.

Besides licensing issues, I am happy to take a look and provide some comments on how your code style matches VTK if you can point me to a public repo with the source code.

    David

[1]: https://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/Remote_Modules
[2]: https://www.paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView/Plugin_HowTo
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