Problem in module's own implementation of freelinking_hook

I'm getting tremendous amount of grief trying to get FreeLinking 3.x and was looking at the freelinking

function freelinking_freelinking() {
  $files = file_scan_directory(
    drupal_get_path('module', 'freelinking') . '/plugins/', '.inc');
  foreach ($files as $path => $file) {
    require $path;
  }
  foreach ($freelinking as $plugin => $definition) {
    if (!$definition['settings']) {
      $freelinking[$plugin]['settings'] = 'freelinking_' . $plugin . '_settings';
    }
  }
  return $freelinking;
}

All of a sudden, there's a freelinking array.... but where does it come from?

I'm very confused how people are successfully using this module at all -- as far as I can tell, the default plugins aren't ever properly loaded, at least in the last several alpha versions.