On Wed, 29 May 2002 18:30:43 +0100, "Nick Lamb" <njl98r@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed, May 29, 2002 at 01:26:07PM +0200, Raphaël Quinet wrote: > > ./gimp-1.2.1.in (Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis) > > ./gimptool-1.2.1.in (Owen Taylor, Manish Singh) > > This is gibberish. Someone bolted on some boiler plate which claims that > the whole of the GIMP is covered by an obnoxious advertising clause. > Most likely this happened because they copied an existing manual page > source from another project. AFAIK, that license refers to the manual pages, not to the whole program. It was certainly added there by mistake, considering who the authors of these manual pages are. So in that case it is probably safe to fix the license immediately. > The presence of this boilerplate is a documentation bug, and can be > fixed by removing the boilerplate or replacing it with a statement > about the GNU GPL. The GPL is not really appropriate for the manual pages. Instead, we should use a BSD-like license without the advertising clause. So we can keep what is already there and just remove that requirement from the license. We could also switch to the FDL, but that would be a significant change that must be discussed with the authors first. > Ben is even complaining about a manual page that he himself wrote, > claiming that it is copyrighted software written by other people. > Please don't substitute 'grep' for a working brain. Note that Ben was not the one complaining. He simply forwarded the Debian bug report from Anthony DeRobertis. And the license is wrong anyway, regardless of who wrote the manual pages. > > ./plug-ins/common/gif.c (David Koblas) > > ./plug-ins/common/tiff.c (Patrick J. Naughton) > > We already knew about at least these and I was told (on #gimp I think) > that it was not a problem. Whoever told you that was wrong. The text of both licenses includes: "provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation." This is the advertising clause that is not compatible with the GPL. As a result, these files cannot be distributed with the GIMP as they are now. > > 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". > > That's nice but you can't redistribute my code under this alternative > license. So you must rewind to a Gimp 0.6x era tiff.c plugin if that's > the preferred solution. This is a serious problem. If we cannot contact the authors of the code that was borrowed for various plug-ins and ask them for permission to re-license their code under the GPL, then the only other option is to use a different license than the GPL for these plug-ins. If this is not possible (as in your case), then we must remove the plug-ins from the distribution until someone finds the time to re-write the code. -Raphaël
