LICENSE 2.8 KB

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  1. * The GIMP application core, and other portions of the official GIMP
  2. distribution not explicitly licensed otherwise, are licensed under
  3. the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE -- see the 'COPYING' file in this
  4. directory for details.
  5. [ The below explicit exemption, we hope, clears up the GIMP
  6. developers' position concerning an ambiguity with the GNU General
  7. Public License concerning what constitutes a 'mere aggregation'
  8. versus a combined or derived work. The intention is to make it
  9. clear that arbitrarily-licensed programs such as GIMP plug-ins do
  10. not automatically assume the GNU General Public License (GPL)
  11. themselves simply because of their invocation of (or by) procedures
  12. implemented in GPL-licensed code, via libgimp or a similar interface
  13. to methods provided by the pdb: ]
  14. * If you create a program which invokes (or provides) methods within
  15. (or for) the GPL GIMP application core through the medium of libgimp
  16. or another implementation of the 'procedural database' (pdb) serial
  17. protocol, then the GIMP developers' position is that this is a 'mere
  18. aggregation' of the program invoking the method and the program
  19. implementing the method as per section 2 of the GNU General Public
  20. License.
  21. * 'libgimp' and the other GIMP libraries are licensed under the
  22. GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE -- see the 'COPYING' file in the
  23. libgimp directory for details.
  24. * Icon themes are licensed under Creative Commons by-sa 3.0 or 4.0. See
  25. the 'COPYING' files in icons/Symbolic and icons/Color respectively.
  26. * Any data used in artworks, such as brushes, patterns and the like, and more
  27. broadly likely all data inside the data/ folder should be under a CC0 license
  28. (Creative Commons Zero) or equivalent, i.e. "No rights Reserved", because GIMP
  29. contributors clearly don't intend to claim any right on anyone's work just
  30. because they used GIMP and its default data.
  31. We cannot clearly give proper licensing on all existing data, prior to the
  32. addition of this note in the LICENSE file (for historical reasons, simply
  33. because their contributors are since long gone), though we can say that an
  34. uncountable number of users have used these for dozens of years and never had
  35. legal problems as far as we know (it is anyway unclear whether anyone could
  36. really claim any right for very basic brush or pattern usage). Since 2015, we
  37. even have a clear FAQ entry to explicitly say the GIMP project has no
  38. intention whatsoever to put restrictions on people's work:
  39. https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#can-i-use-gimp-commercially
  40. Therefore any new data file under the data/ folder will be expected to be CC0.
  41. All contributors are expected to read the LICENSE file and therefore are
  42. implicitly agreeing to license their data under CC0 by contributing it as core
  43. GIMP data.