Nathan Carl Summers wrote:

I saw this program and thought it might be interesting to GIMP users and developers.
http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

Hopefully Gimp 2.0/GEGL/PUPUS will use some of the ideas there.

Development on PuPus stopped a long time ago due to time constraints. I posted a message over a year ago making that clear (and offering the prototype code so far, FWIW), but I thought I'd better just remind people of that fact now since the name has reared it head again multiple times in the last couple of weeks.

I looked at vips/nip just recently. The most exciting thing about it was that it seems to implement most of the interesting parts of the PuPus idea, namely the pull-driven lazy processing and a network of region-based dependancies. It also supports lots of exciting pixel formats and colours spaces.

The user interface is completely horrifying, though, at least from the point of view of someone who expects something even vaguely resembling a retouching or painting program (the front-end 'nip' doesn't really claim to be that, though).

Fortunately its region-deps and image-processing back-end is well- separated from its user-interface; unfortunately the back-end is GPL which scuppers any realistic plans of GIMP's own back-end being able to move to it, I think.

--Adam

Adam D. Moss wrote:

unfortunately the back-end is GPL which scuppers any realistic plans of GIMP's own back-end being able to move to it, I think.

Eh? This doesn't appear to make sense.

David Hodson wrote:

Adam D. Moss wrote:

unfortunately the back-end is GPL which scuppers any realistic plans of GIMP's own back-end being able to move to it, I think.

Eh? This doesn't appear to make sense.

The goal (I thought) was to keep the lowest levels (GEGL etc) of GIMP's back-end LGPL.

On Sun, Dec 22, 2002 at 05:24:03PM +0000, Adam D. Moss wrote:

The goal (I thought) was to keep the lowest levels (GEGL etc) of GIMP's back-end LGPL.

I don't see any reason to do that. Are any of us likely to benefit from (usually small and rather poor) developers "ripping" off these parts of The GIMP and re-using them in various dodgy shareware apps?

Is there an existing architecture that people will use instead if we "threaten" them with the very reasonable terms of the GNU GPL?

Personally I think The GIMP has been exploited (not by any projects with the name 'GIMP' in them, I hasten to add) more than enough as it is. If someone has a proposal that requires more relaxed licensing then let them bring forth the proposal FIRST. So far I'm not very happy with the results of re-licensing and would be loathe to permit any further erosion.

I've always thought of VIPS (which is used extensively by some members of my research group) as a very different type of app from The GIMP, but I don't doubt that there's some commonality which could be exploited.

Nick.

On Mon, Dec 23, 2002 at 07:52:57PM +0000, Nick Lamb wrote:

The goal (I thought) was to keep the lowest levels (GEGL etc) of GIMP's back-end LGPL.

I don't see any reason to do that.

Well, if the developrs of GEGL decide to do that I'd be fine with it. The question is wether code from vips could/should be reused. It looks very extensive (I especially like it's lazy evaluation ;).

And the vips license can't be changed.

So the question is wether the license alone would be a valid reason to stop using it.

Is there an existing architecture that people will use instead if we "threaten" them with the very reasonable terms of the GNU GPL?

(and if yes, would that be a problem?)

Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2002 19:52:57 +0000 From: Nick Lamb

Personally I think The GIMP has been exploited (not by any projects with the name 'GIMP' in them, I hasten to add) more than enough as it is. If someone has a proposal that requires more relaxed licensing then let them bring forth the proposal FIRST. So far I'm not very happy with the results of re-licensing and would be loathe to permit any further erosion.

As the lead for one of those non-exploitive projects that uses "GIMP" in the name, I concur.

We've never seriously considered relicensing Gimp-print. We've also never gotten any serious pressure to; commercial vendors (in particular, Epson) have no trouble with the GPL license. I'd personally rather not LGPL any of it because even the low level infrastructure could be useful for, say, a printer vendor that wanted to create a proprietary driver. I'd also really rather somebody not write, say, a proprietary dither algorithm and try to sell the package without source.

I take a rather dim view of those who believe that there's some kind of inherent "right" to take communal code, make improvements, and then redistribute the combination in proprietary fashion (Microsoft in particular, but they're not the only ones). I'm rather more sympathetic to those who have something that's truly free source, but incompatible with the GPL for some minor reason, but it's not clear to me how to solve that problem.

Hi,

Nick Lamb writes:

On Sun, Dec 22, 2002 at 05:24:03PM +0000, Adam D. Moss wrote:

The goal (I thought) was to keep the lowest levels (GEGL etc) of GIMP's back-end LGPL.

I don't see any reason to do that. Are any of us likely to benefit from (usually small and rather poor) developers "ripping" off these parts of The GIMP and re-using them in various dodgy shareware apps?

that was not the idea behind it. Rather the rationale to license libgimp as LGPL was to allow for commercial closed-source plug-ins. With the current plug-in design the library that needs to be linked to a plug-in is rather small and it makes sense to keep it LGPL. As soon as we start to move more of the GIMP's core functionality into libraries we might however decide to license these as GPL. The situation for commercial plug-ins wouldn't change, they could continue to use the functionality provided thru the PDB.

Salut, Sven

Is the plugin registry at registry.gimp.org working? I'm trying to register as an author and list some plugins, but I just keep getting asked for name and password info.

On 31 Dec 2002, at 15:07, David Hodson wrote:

Is the plugin registry at registry.gimp.org working? I'm trying to register as an author and list some plugins, but I just keep getting asked for name and password info.

I had the same thing the other day. But I had registered before, and forgotten my password. So I tried to register again, using the same e- mail address, which seemed to work until I tried to login. When I used another e-mail address, everything seemed to work fine.