Hi; I have been developing commercial software for telecine color correction (film to tape transfer) using GTK on Linux for nearly a year now. I have a requirement to offer filter plug-ins and wish to explore using the GIMP Plug-ins. I did an exploratory post asking if anyone was aware of using GIMP plug-ins in non-GIMP apps last week but did not get a reply. I have been working on this some more and wish to pursue this further. As far as I can determine, for those Plug-ins which are GPLed there should be no problem with us distributing them so long as we comply with the license requirements. We would, however, like to be able to use some GIMP modules as the basis of an API emulator, notably plug_in.c and perhaps others once we become more familiar with the problem. This is strictly a convenience to avoid us having to write the "GIMP" side of the API from scratch. For us to do so would require the license on these modules changed from GPL to LGPL so that they could be linked into our non-free software. I assume this request should ultimately be directed to Peter and Spencer but I wish to put it out for consideration by the developers. We would also like to be aware of any changes to the plug-in API by the developers. By our understanding, if the GIMP modules required for the plug-in API could be LGPLed than we could use them as the basis for a library which could be used by any app which wanted to use GIMP plug-ins. This library would, of course, remain freely available and we would be pleased to contribute to that work. For our purposes we only need basic filter plug-ins but that's at least a start. Why should GIMP offer a plug-in API emulation library? It would enhance the position of GIMP as a viable alternative to Photoshop and enhance the atttractiveness of GTK as a toolkit and Linux as an OS. To the best of my knowledge we were the only company showing a product at the last SIGGRAPH implemented with GTK on Linux. (I would love to hear of others so I could tell my boss!). Several digital effects and compositing systems have implemented Photoshop Plugin API emulators so they can run Photoshop Plugins including Commotion and Digital Fusion. If we are to have a competitive product we need to be able to provide a plug-in API, ideally one with a good body of existing plug-ins. I am very interested in anyone's comments on these issues. Regards; Bill Dolson
