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

[Nils Philippsen]

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?

Nils
-- 
Nils Philippsen      "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase 
Red Hat               a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty
nils at redhat.com       nor Safety."  --  Benjamin Franklin, 1759
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