Aargh! My apologies for an earlier mail, I must have accidentally hit
the Send button. :-(
On 11 May 2003, at 14:52, David Neary wrote:
> Sven Neumann wrote:
> > David Neary <bolsh@xxxxxxxx> writes:
> The way I see it, there are 3 solutions -
>
> 1) Accept that SIOD stays, and if repackagers want to distributee the
> GIMP as non-free, then so be it. Either copy gif code from another gpl
> program (say gif2png) or contact opriginal author for re-licencing, or
> add it as an exception. Contact nlfilter author for relicencing, or
> drop plug-in. If the contacts don't yielmd answers by the end of this
> week, we should make a decision.
>
> For the rest of the code, either acknowledge that there is code
> that needs relicencing, and get onto the people who did it, or
> declare that all the code that was taken from bsd licenced
> software was fairly trivial, and re-licence under GPL. For the
> most part, the latter should do.
>
> 2) Continue to delay the release of a bug-fix patch for the gimp
> until we have a new, fully tested scheme interpreter, and we can
> get in contact with anyone who ever wrote code for the gimp and
> didn't realise that the BSD advertising clause was incompatible
> with the GPL (even if they're now working a humanitarian aid
> worker in the Peru highlands who haven't looked at a computer
> since they wrote a gimp plug-in as their final year project).
>
> I think we should go for 1, send requests to relicence bits of
> borrowed code to GPL for the important bits, just declare
> ourselves compliant and relicence for the trivial bits, add SIOD
> as an exception to our GPL, and if we haven't gotten permission
> to relicence nlfilter by next Friday, drop it. If we haven't
> gotten permission to relicence gif, steal some gpl code. Or steal some
> GPL code now...
Did I miss a solution (you said three)?
>From an older thread ("Copyrights and licenses", May 2001):
On 29 May 2001, at 14:30, Sven Neumann wrote:
> Dave Neary <dave.neary@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> > Sven:
> > > Everything distributed with The GIMP should be GPL, LGPL or a
> > > compatible license. Actually we assume that all plug-ins in the
> > > GIMP distribution are GPLed.
> >
> > To my mind (and I may be wrong there), plug-ins are just
> > applications which depend on the GIMP, and an interface
> > provided by it - so they can be licenced under any old
> > licence that you might deign to choose. In much the same
> > way as (say) proprietary Linux applications are just
> > applications which depend on Linux & interfaces it
> > provides (when distributed in binary form anyway).
> >
> > So if one wanted to release a plug-in as a proprietary
> > application (God knows why you'd want to - I don't
> > believe anyone would pay for a module to a graphics
> > application), I don't see any GPL issues myself. Am I
> > wrong?
>
> You are right. I was speaking about plug-ins/scripts
> distributed with The GIMP. We have choosen to make libgimp
> LGPL to allow others to choose different licenses for their
> plug-ins, but we will refuse to distribute them with The GIMP.
So it would seem the policy was only to allow GPL'ed plug-ins, even
if we don't have to.
> In any case, I think that we should split it into 3 bugs,
> nlfilter, gif and SIOD licencing, and for the rest, just declare
> everything GPL.
Can anyone but the author declare something to be GPL'ed? How does
that work?
--
branko collin
collin@xxxxxxxxx
