GPL and Plug-INs and XML\Ada

["David Botton" <David@Botton.com>]

If a person wrote an executable that had a plug-in architecture, would it be
possible then to include GPL'd plug-ins with out the application becoming
GPL'd?

For example, If I wrote an application that had a closed lic. and it allowed
features to be plugged-in. One such group of features was for file "import".
So, I throw together a GPL'd plug-in that included XML\Ada and dropped that
dll in the dir and it is picked up at run time by the closed lic.
application.

This would be different than:

I write an XML COM object that uses XML\Ada and now my XML COM object is of
course GPL'd, but closed lic. programs (say in VB or Ada) could now use my
XML COM object to access XML.

I could see where this case would be problematic (although I question that
also), but the previous cases seems to be no problem. Would including a
GPL'd COM / Corba object virus to my app and make it GPL'd?

Thoughts?

David Botton