On Tue, 28 May 2002 14:52:53 -0700, "Ben Gertzfield" <che@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Howdy GIMP folks. Here are some points in the licensing of GIMP that > need to be addressed. Specifically, there's a lot of code that requires > that the authors be mentioned in the documentation, but there is no > mention of them anywhere. Hmmm... This is bad, because this is not compatible with the GPL. So we must either stop distributing these files or distribute them in a separate package that is not GPL'ed. > I'm not really up to speed with these issues, so if discussion is > needed, please bring it up with Anthony DeRobertis > <anthony@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, the originator of this bug report. I don't know if you want to get a copy of the messages and if I should also CC them to the debian bug tracker. If not, please mention it on the gimp-developer mailing list before others do the same mistake as I am doing right now. ;-) Here is a sorted list of files that have copyright notices that are not compatible with the GPL (derivatives of the BSD license with the so-called "advertising clause"): ./gimp-1.2.1.in (Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis) ./gimptool-1.2.1.in (Owen Taylor, Manish Singh) ./install-sh (M.I.T.) ./plug-ins/common/edge.c (Jef Poskanzer) ./plug-ins/common/gif.c (David Koblas) ./plug-ins/common/mail.c (CMU and Bellcore) ./plug-ins/common/nlfilt.c (Graeme W. Gill) ./plug-ins/common/tiff.c (Patrick J. Naughton) ./plug-ins/webbrowser/webbrowser.c (Netscape, Jamie Zawinski, Andreas Stolcke, Solbourne Computer) ./plug-ins/script-fu/interp_slib.c (Paradigm Associates, Inc.) ./tools/gimp-remote.c (Netscape, Jamie Zawinski) The first two files in the list are manual pages copyrighted by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis and by Owen Taylor and Manish Singh. I think that the "advertising clause" is an accident and they did not intend to have a license that is not compatible with the GPL, but we should ask them to be sure (the copyright holders are the only ones who are allowed to change the terms of the license). The "install-sh" file is part of automake. It should not be too hard to replace it by a similar file that is compatible with the GPL, because this is a relatively short shell script. I thought that the automake developers had already changed this file, but apparently not. The other files are more annoying. The first thing to do would be to remove the GPL statement at the top of theses files because it is incompatible with the "advertising clause". From a legal point of view, these files cannot be distributed as they are now, so we must at least change their license immediately and then think about what we can do with these non-GPL files. We cannot simply remove them, because Script-Fu is an important part of the GIMP and gimp-remote is required for some desktop environments. Even if gimp-remote should be replaced sooner or later (see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52866), it would be too hard to do it before the 1.2.4 release. It would also be too hard to rewrite the other plug-ins now (except maybe for the edge filter, which uses well-known algorithms). The two remaining options are to split the GIMP distribution in two packages or to change the license of the distribution: - If we split the distribution, we could have one tar archive with GPL files (or GPL-compatible files) and another one with the files mentioned above. This would also cover some patent problems for the GIF and TIFF plug-ins. However, it would not like to move Script-Fu out of the main GIMP distribution. - The other option is to change the license for the distribution and to add the required copyright notices in the GIMP help files. For the license of the package, we could state the the GIMP distribution is simply aggregating several independent packages that have their own license. We would also have to notify those who build binary packages about the license change. However, I am not sure that it is even possible to have a valid license for the aggregate, while still respecting the GPL and the old-style BSD-ish licenses. I have created a GIMP bug report for this issue. You can get it from Bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83362 -Raphaël