cuneiform team mailing list archive

["Yury V. Zaytsev" <yury@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2009-01-22 at 11:36 +0200, Jussi Pakkanen wrote:

> The license page has a limitation similar to the "BSD advertising
> clause" which is is incompatible with GPL. Then it says that you have
> to use it even if you use the code under the GPL. This requirement
> does not appear in the actual license text (or maybe it does, hidden
> somewhere, I stopped wading through the legalese after a while). This
> is ambiguous, which in legal issues is always bad.

The actual page reads ( http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/license.html ):

FreeImage is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and the
FreeImage Public License (FIPL)

You can choose the license that has the most advantages for you:

* Use the liberal FreeImage Public License to use FreeImage
commercially 

or

* Use the GNU General Public License to use FreeImage into your open
source project. 

As far as I understand, Dmitry was asking about FIPL because Cuneiform
is licensed under BSD and he wanted to keep the licence as liberal as
possible.

Still we have no problem using FreeImage under GPL since ImageMagick is
GPL... 

But this probably means that the console cuneiform-cli utility has to be
distributed under GPL, not BSD, as there is no "Larger Work" exception
for GPL (hence we have LGPL), so we are currently violating ImageMagick
licence by distributing it under BSD.

Or we have to switch to something else (FreeImage + BSD-compatible
FIPL).
 
-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev