GIMP vs. poppler licensing, was: So you want to test an unstable GIMP...

[Simo Sorce]

On Thu, 2011-09-01 at 20:42 +0200, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> It seems one always forgets something... well, better this than leaving
> the stove on.
> 
> On Thu, 2011-09-01 at 12:45 +0200, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> > Here's the gist (in no particular order):
> 
> - GIMP 2.7 and later is licensed as "GPLv3+ and LGPLv3+" (executables,
> libraries)
> - This makes it incompatible with poppler's license (GPLv2 only,
> inherited from xpdf at the time). The xpdf license has since been
> amended to "GPLv2 or GPLv3" in version 3.03 and poppler will follow suit
> in version 0.20. In the meantime, I'll build GIMP without poppler,
> falling back to using the postscript plugin for importing PDF files. As
> soon as poppler packages with the new license are available, I'll revert
> to using it again. In this case the GIMP will have a file-pdf plugin
> again which will be licensed as "GPLv2 or GPLv3" (as it's an exe of its
> own).
> 
> Legal question: is it better to put this in its own subpackage to be
> able to specify this individual license, or would GIMP better have
> "GPLv3+ and LGPLv3+ and (GPLv2 or GPLv3)" as its license?

if you combine them in a single package then I guess you'll have to drop
the '+' from the license, as the non '+' components prevents it.

IANAL of course.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York