Greetings,
If there is anything we can do to help with these issues, please just let me know and I will get my guy on it.
On Thursday, March 20, 2003, at 08:28 AM, Sven Neumann wrote:
Hi,
Raphaël Quinet <quinet@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Well, yes this is a ridiculous bug. However, the license problems are now publicly known. And there is a Debian bug report related to that. So I assume that any distribution that is aware of these issues and cares about being able to distribute packages legally would consider this bug to be a blocker. Otherwise, they would be liable in the (unlikely) case that some copyright holder complains about the licenses. Not very likely, maybe, but some distributors are probably taking these legal issues seriously.
Well, we already took care about a couple of affected files. Let's look at the remaining files:
plug-ins/common/edge.c
This file has about 500 lines from which at least 400 are completely GIMP specific. The algorithm used boils down to a few lines and could probably be "discovered" by any high-school student who made his/her maths homework from time to time. I'd like to cite RMS here: "You don't need to worry about copyrights or licenses for just a few lines of code."
plug-ins/common/gif.c
This one is difficult since its a mix of some older code for which the license is not perfectly clear and lots of new code that has been added while this file lived in the GIMP source tree under a GPL license. Definitely a difficult choice with rather unpleasant consequences since other projects have long adapted this code under GPL and LGPL licenses.
plug-ins/common/mail.c
This plug-in contains a few lines that perform base64 encoding. The authors of this code should feel honored for being mentioned since anyone could take the base64 spec and rewrite this from scratch.
plug-ins/common/nlfilt.c
The algorithms here are not really trivial and it would make sense to try to contact the author. If he doesn't agree to relicense his code, we could just drop the plug-in.
plug-ins/common/tiff.c
I don't see where this plug-in uses any non-GIMP-specific code that is worth being mentioned. The TIFF file format is handled by libtiff and I doubt there's anything in this plug-in that can not be determined from reading the libtiff docs.
plug-ins/webbrowser/webbrowser.c
The algorithm used here is rather trivial and can be redone using the docs provided by Netscape. The original authors should feel honored for being mentioned. We want to get rid of this plug-in for GIMP-1.4 anyway.
plug-ins/script-fu/interp_slib.c
I'd rather not have to rewrite this one. But then we have always very clearly stated the source of the SIOD interpreter that runs Script-Fu. Just go and try 'gimp-1.3 -i -b -'. You will see the following lines:
Welcome to SIOD, Scheme In One Defun, Version 3.2x 12-MAR-96 (C) Copyright 1988-1994 Paradigm Associates Inc. Help: (help)
IMO this is exactly what the SIOD license asks for. I don't see any problems.
Salut, Sven _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
