Hi.

I do not know the X11 license, but changing the license of the plugin template recalls me of one thing:

If the GIMP is under the GPL, with no exceptions listed were appropriate, them it is ilegal for non GPL-compatible plugins to be installed.

This is quite clear on the GPL-FAQ. And for great that it may seen for some people to have some proprietary plugins developed for the GIMP, that otherwise would not, we get better respecting the GPL or __else__.

To allow for non gpl-compatible plugins to run with the GIMP, the license of the GIMP itself must include an exception note, stating that.

Sven Neumann wrote:

Hi,

going hand in hand with the 1.3.17 release, there's now an updated version of the gimp-plugin-template available from

ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/plugin-template/

The template has been relicensed to a less restrictive X11-style license (thanks to Adam for his patch) and was updated to follow the GIMP-1.3 API changes. It requires at least GIMP-1.3.17. If you want to write a larger plug-in for GIMP 2.0, this package should give you a good start.

Sven

great to see a new development release again, i will definately update my GTK in order to build this one :)

i played around with the Wilber Construction kit some time ago and added some shiny higlights, i've just uploaded it to http://gug.sunsite.dk/gallery.php?artist=123 if you want to have a look and maybe use it if you like the additions.

Phil.

Hi,

going hand in hand with the 1.3.17 release, there's now an updated version of the gimp-plugin-template available from

ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/plugin-template/

The template has been relicensed to a less restrictive X11-style license (thanks to Adam for his patch) and was updated to follow the GIMP-1.3 API changes. It requires at least GIMP-1.3.17. If you want to write a larger plug-in for GIMP 2.0, this package should give you a good start.

Sven

__________________

On Fri, 25 Jul 2003, Joao S. O. Bueno wrote:

Hi.

I do not know the X11 license, but changing the license of the plugin template recalls me of one thing:

If the GIMP is under the GPL, with no exceptions listed were appropriate, them it is ilegal for non GPL-compatible plugins to be installed.

Gimp plugins do not link with the Gimp and thus do not fall under Gimp's licence. Gimp plugins do link with libgimp*, which is licensed under the LGPL.

Rockwalrus

On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 01:57:15PM -0300, Joao S. O. Bueno wrote:

Hi.

I do not know the X11 license, but changing the license of the plugin template recalls me of one thing:

If the GIMP is under the GPL, with no exceptions listed were appropriate, them it is ilegal for non GPL-compatible plugins to be installed.

This is quite clear on the GPL-FAQ. And for great that it may seen for some people to have some proprietary plugins developed for the GIMP, that otherwise would not, we get better respecting the GPL or __else__.

To allow for non gpl-compatible plugins to run with the GIMP, the license of the GIMP itself must include an exception note, stating that.

The libraries needed for a GIMP plug-in are licensed under the LGPL. The way the architecture is now, plug-ins don't link against the app directly.

-Yosh

Joao S. O. Bueno wrote:

If the GIMP is under the GPL, with no exceptions listed were appropriate, them it is ilegal for non GPL-compatible plugins to be installed.

This is quite clear on the GPL-FAQ. And for great that it may seen for some people to have some proprietary plugins developed for the GIMP, that otherwise would not, we get better respecting the GPL or __else__.

I wouldn't be quite so alarmist, since We The GIMP Developers would be the ones who reserve the final right to be upset about non-GPL plugins calling into the GPL GIMP core (in a seperate process via a wire protocol and great indirection but yes, this is still apparently 'linking' in the GPL sense according to very recent thought) -- and we've already made it clear /in intent/ from a very early stage that non-GPL plugins are allowed, by dint of putting libgimp under LGPL.

I agree that it would be wise to point out this explicit exemption for pdb calls into the GIMP LICENSE file. I'll do this soon if I don't get beaten to it.

--Adam (IANAL)

Manish Singh wrote:

The libraries needed for a GIMP plug-in are licensed under the LGPL. The way the architecture is now, plug-ins don't link against the app directly.

Quite so. However, from the GPL FAQ (I presume this is the root of Joao's excitement):

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation

This implies that it *may* be quite plausible for the GIMP core to be considered as part of a plugin (or vice versa). Considered by whom, though, is another question. As I said, the ones to take umbrage at this binary coupling would be us, the developers, and we clearly don't intend to. But it probably worth making this clear as an explicit exemption in the LICENSE (this isn't an unusual action, for example GCC's libstdc code is GPL-licensed with exemptions for the resulting binary so as not to GPL-infect every C program built with with GCC[1]).

--Adam
[1] Except for GCC versions circa 3.1 where they forgot to exempt some portions of the code that ends up in the installed libstdc so the aggregate libstdc and hence almost all C programs built with that compiler are *technically* GPL- infected -- but still, their intent is clear, that this was simply an oversight and they have no intention of asserting the GPL on their users.

[s/libstdc/libgcc/g, sorry.]

Joao S. O. Bueno wrote:

I do not know the X11 license, but changing the license of the plugin template recalls me of one thing:

If the GIMP is under the GPL, with no exceptions listed were appropriate, them it is ilegal for non GPL-compatible plugins to be installed.

The GPL doesn't care which licence is used before it gets it, as long as it is consistent with the terms of the GPL (that is, as long as the program can be released under the GPL without breaching the opriginal licence). This is the case with the X11 licence. Many people like the idea of their work being used by the greatest number of people possible, regardless of the conditions in which it's used. These people choiose a licence which is more liberal than the GPL.

This is quite clear on the GPL-FAQ. And for great that it may seen for some people to have some proprietary plugins developed for the GIMP, that otherwise would not, we get better respecting the GPL or __else__.

The X11 licelce is GPL compatible. That means that X11 code can be released under the GPL, and there's nothing the original authors can do about it. So there is no problem with code which is licenced under the X11 licence being included in the gimp.

To allow for non gpl-compatible plugins to run with the GIMP, the license of the GIMP itself must include an exception note, stating that.

And this is horse-bucky. The GIMP provides an interface (the PDB) via which plug-ins communicate with the gimp core. Nothing obliges those plug-ins to be released under the GPL. They link against libgimp (which is lgpl).

Cheers, Dave.

Nathan Carl Summers writes:
> Gimp plugins do not link with the Gimp and thus do not fall under Gimp's > licence. Gimp plugins do link with libgimp*, which is licensed under the > LGPL.

Are there any licensing issues, BTW, with the pspi plug-in? (The GIMP plug-in that interfaces to Photoshop plugins.) It is currently licensed under the GPL. (I am the copyright holder, so I could change its license if necessary.) The Photoshop plugins that it is able to load (as DLLs) are of course in general totally proprietary software. Is there any problem with this? (I don't distribute any Photoshop plugins.)

("Photoshop plugin" here de facto means 3rd party Photoshop plugins, as Adobe's owns aren't useable by other PS plugin hosts than Adobe's own products.)

--tml

Tor Lillqvist wrote:
> Nathan Carl Summers writes:
> > Gimp plugins do not link with the Gimp and thus do not fall under Gimp's
> > licence. Gimp plugins do link with libgimp*, which is licensed under the
> > LGPL.
(note that Nathan's analysis is correct but incomplete, I believe)

> Are there any licensing issues, BTW, with the pspi plug-in? (The GIMP > plug-in that interfaces to Photoshop plugins.) It is currently > licensed under the GPL. (I am the copyright holder, so I could change > its license if necessary.) The Photoshop plugins that it is able to > load (as DLLs) are of course in general totally proprietary > software. Is there any problem with this? (I don't distribute any > Photoshop plugins.)

I can't confidently say, myself. Technically in this case it's the end-user that is doing the 'linking' of the GPL and non-GPL code so you are personally not responsible for anything but having somewhat ill-licensed the pspi plugin for its intended use. :) But, my GPL interpretation gets fuzzy here because no-one is then simply redistributing the result of linking pspi and the Photoshop plugin, and the GPL is generally concerned with distribution rights, not private usage. (But then one part of me says 'so why would a non-GPL program depending on a GPL shared lib ever be a problem?' and things spiral down The GNU Ambiguity Vortex again.)

But to me, your plugin sounds much more license-comfortable as LGPL (its entire nature, really, being that it links to foreign-licensed code).

--Adam (NAL)

Adam D. Moss wrote:

I agree that it would be wise to point out this explicit exemption for pdb calls into the GIMP LICENSE file. I'll do this soon if I don't get beaten to it.

Done, for 1.2 and 1.3. (If anyone disagrees with the specifics, pull it...)

--Adam

Adam D. Moss wrote:

Adam D. Moss wrote:

I agree that it would be wise to point out this explicit exemption for pdb calls into the GIMP LICENSE file. I'll do this soon if I don't get beaten to it.

Done, for 1.2 and 1.3. (If anyone disagrees with the specifics, pull it...)

--Adam

can someone explain these license problems in perfectly good fuzzy american words, complete with adjectives and interjections; perhaps limited to only 3 conjunctions for me?

i keep thinking that if i were to run through, and randomly assign creative commons licenses to lets say every "10 words" of gimp source, once it got cleaned up, it would be perfect or at least wrong in an area no one cares about.

i am having a problem understanding what all the problems with this stuff is.

thank you in advance, carol

Carol Spears wrote:

can someone explain these license problems in perfectly good fuzzy american words, complete with adjectives and interjections; perhaps limited to only 3 conjunctions for me?

1) The GPL doesn't allow a GPL and a not-GPL-compatible code unit to be intimately linked together. 2) It might be argued that the basic dependance and interconnection of a not-GPL-compatible plug-in with the GPL GIMP core via libgimp and the wire protocol is intimate enough that the two cannot be considered independent and separate works. (Yeah, really.) 3) This checkin makes our intention clear, as those imposing the license, that 2) is really not a problem.

--Adam

Adam D. Moss wrote:

Carol Spears wrote:

can someone explain these license problems in perfectly good fuzzy american words, complete with adjectives and interjections; perhaps limited to only 3 conjunctions for me?

1) The GPL doesn't allow a GPL and a not-GPL-compatible code unit to be intimately linked together. 2) It might be argued that the basic dependance and interconnection of a not-GPL-compatible plug-in with the GPL GIMP core via libgimp and the wire protocol is intimate enough that the two cannot be considered independent and separate works. (Yeah, really.) 3) This checkin makes our intention clear, as those imposing the license, that 2) is really not a problem.

--Adam

for some reason, i thought that when gnu put the url to the creative commons page on their site and when the creative commons put gpl in the list of options, that all the license problems would go away.

stripping everything from the libgimp package and offereing each piece clearly licensed from one of a dozen or so web sites or people who want to distribute cds individually .... would this end the problems?

carol

Carol Spears wrote:

for some reason, i thought that when gnu put the url to the creative commons page on their site and when the creative commons put gpl in the list of options, that all the license problems would go away.

Gosh... no.

stripping everything from the libgimp package and offereing each piece clearly licensed from one of a dozen or so web sites or people who want to distribute cds individually .... would this end the problems?

No, that wouldn't help at all (least of all because this isn't really a problem of [re]distribution).

But don't worry, this problem is solved. It wasn't much of a problem, just an ambiguity. Gone now. Rest easy.

--Adam

On Sat, 26 Jul 2003, Adam D. Moss wrote:

2) It might be argued that the basic dependance and interconnection of a not-GPL-compatible plug-in with the GPL GIMP core via libgimp and the wire protocol is intimate enough that the two cannot be considered independent and separate works. (Yeah, really.)

From my reading of the exogen---oh, I don't know how to spell that

word--of the GPL, that is mitigated by the fact that there exist (existed?) programs other than gimp that can use gimp plugins.

Rockwalrus

Nathan Carl Summers wrote:

On Sat, 26 Jul 2003, Adam D. Moss wrote:

2) It might be argued that the basic dependance and interconnection of a not-GPL-compatible plug-in with the GPL GIMP core via libgimp and the wire protocol is intimate enough that the two cannot be considered independent and separate works. (Yeah, really.)

From my reading of the exogen---oh, I don't know how to spell that

word--of the GPL, that is mitigated by the fact that there exist (existed?) programs other than gimp that can use gimp plugins.

Personally, I agree that this would be a strong argument 'in court'. But there's still no need to have any ambiguity at all.

--Adam