Hosting plugin with excanvas (dependency of flot, jqPlot and more) in official repository?

As of May 2012 plugin repo rules have been updated, allowing Apache License 2.0 and some other previously incompatible licenses:

The plugin directory’s licensing guidelines have been updated. The guidelines will now allow code that is licensed under (or compatible with) version 3 of the GPL.

The guidelines still encourage use of “GPLv2 or later,” the same license as WordPress. However, we understand that many open source libraries use other licenses that are nonetheless compatible, such as GPLv2 only, GPLv3, and Apache 2.0.

Nacin

I'm quite certain that now wordpress.com itself uses flot - see the WordPress blog sexy stats post. I'd say that's good enough reason to ignore any wordpress.org complaints.

As requested, here it is as an answer. :-)

I would say yes, but WP.org seems to be a bit anal on GPLv2-and-only-GPLv2. It's like they can't be bothered to understand that there are OSS licenses that are more free than what the FSF promotes.

The easiest thing I think is to ask wordpress.org if it's possible that they host your plugin with GPL v3+ compatibility. Probably they say yes. Give it a try, the discussion was very new back in the end of January so points of views might be a bit more settled these days.

IMHO there is not really something to loose if they allow GPL v3+ plugins in the repository.

In case they find code that is cool for core, they can ask. I mean, who would not relicense code then if it's possible. It's nothing as static as it's often said.

The next thing you can do is to ask the excanvas project if you can use their code under MIT as well. Probably they do allow you that. Ask them. Probably that's already possible, because flot ships under MIT and it incorporates the excanvas code in it's package. But you should always ask on your own.

Automattic's Stats plugin uses Open Flash Chart, which is licensed under LGPL, so you might want to take a look at that.