Restrictions of the FreeImage license

[Almar Klein]

FreeImage has a dual licensing model. GPL and its own custom license (FIPL). The imageio project will be BSD (or maybe MIT) licensed. That means it's incompatible with GPL.

I quickly skimmed through the FIPL but I find it hard to tell whether it poses any limitations for our users. Does anyone has an idea about this?

If necessary, we might try to convince the FreeImage people to also provide a LGPL license, which would allow us to use the binary libraries as is (similar to Qt).

  Almar

[Almar Klein]

I forgot. Here's a link to their FIPL: http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/freeimage-license.txt

[Zach Pincus]

We had a discussion of this on the skimage list a while ago, regarding distributing binaries:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/scikits-image/kHv8fRDVPSU

The decision was that the FIPL would allow that without difficulty. As far as just distributing code that could, in the users' hands, call into a binary library that the user got elsewhere, even the GPL has nothing to say about that.