FreeImage binaries

[Zachary Pincus]

> On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 12:13 PM, Zachary Pincus <zachary.pincus at yale.edu> wrote:
>> Also, is anyone a license-maven? Is this sort of thing (distributing binaries, then downloading and run-time loading them in a BSD-licensced project) OK under the GPL (v2) or the FreeImage license?
>> http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/license.html
> 
> Meh, licensing :)
> 
> My take (and these issues are tricky, so IANAL and all that):
> 
> The combined work (skimage + freeimage) must be distributed under the
> terms of the GPL.  Our license (the Modified BSD) is more permissive
> than the GPL, so the GPL simply imposes some additional restrictions.
> 
> As far as I understand, you are within your rights to distribute
> patches to GPL code under any license you wish (which is, in a tenuous
> sense, what we're doing).
> 
> When we distribute skimage + the freeimage plugin (but no freeimage
> binary), our distribution is only governed by the permissive BSD.
> E.g., a company may use our code with the Matlotlib backend, mix it in
> with their own (proprietary) code, and not have to worry about
> anything.  If we write the "install_libs" command, we may want to
> clearly state what the implications are.
> 
> Also, an interesting perspective on incorporating BSD code into GPL projects:
> 
> http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html

Yeah, I think we'd be on thin ice for GPL -- at a minimum we'd need to have a copy of the FreeImage sources available somewhere, just to distribute the binaries. Then the "install_libs()" thing seems very close to cheating the spirit if not the practice of the license. (LGPL would be a different matter.)

So I read further about the FreeImage license and it looks sufficiently permissive for this case. I *think* we just need to make sure to also copy over the FreeImage license file and a relevant readme when we cause the binaries to be downloaded. But another opinion might be useful, if you want to look at that license:
https://github.com/zachrahan/freeimage-sharedlib/blob/master/license-fi.txt

And as you can see, I've put up the binaries I have so far here:
https://github.com/zachrahan/freeimage-sharedlib

I still need a win64 DLL. And I also have no idea what the story is with linux shared libs -- is it easy to distribute such for a given architecture, or do these get so fragmented that it makes more sense to just have the user make their package manager install FreeImage?

Zach