I saw over on LWN.net (a very valuable resource for technology articles, well worth your $5), that a RAW picture editor called RawTherapee had been re-licensed from Freeware (gratis, but proprietary) to Free Software, under the GPLv3. The application is something I won't use myself, and I can't even manage the comparison to DigiKam (which I don't use either). Technologically it looks quite cool, from the cmake-based build (yes, having a build system that supports cross-platform development effectively can be a wonderful thing) to the (comprehensive and multi-lingual) ODT manuals. I miss the nice KDE reporting of missing dependencies summarized in a list at the end, though. Something to contribute, over there.

The author, Gábor Horváth, states some interesting reasons for freeing the whole thing; I personally think the "family" argument is the strongest one, and it's important to spend time with your (small) kids. Of course, at 10 months you can still code with the baby on your tummy. The other motivations are largely a matter of growing the community of developers and contributors in order to get better coverage of all the aspects of development (GUI, documentation, algorithms, translations) and smoother development by not depending on a single individual. All good reasons, to be sure. Whether these are good motivations to choose GPLv3, I don't know (over some other copyleft license that encourages community building).

I'm going to admit a very non-charitable reason for looking more closely at RawTherapee: I was intending to bitch and moan about the state of the source code and the licensing and then point out how it should be done, by gorm. Instead, I can point to RawTherapee (as of SVN revision 31) as an example of a Free Software project done (pretty) well:

  • (good) Clear license choice; although the license is in a file called "copying" instead of the canonical "COPYING", it's the complete text of the GPLv3.
  • (good) Every file has a complete copyright header, including sufficient license text and an identifiable copyright holder. As the project grows, it will be interesting to see if it manages to keep a good grip on its contributors -- that is, if everyone who adds a copyrightable contribution to the code actually adds a meaningful copyright holder line to the file headers. This would be, roughly, clause 5a of the GPLv3.
  • (bad) The distribution from SVN includes a few pre-compiled libraries (jpeg, lcms, png, tiff, z) for windows and accompanying header files. Of that lot, jpeg doesn't mention its license terms in the file header (but refers to a README that has been lost). I hunted down the relevant source distribution, and the README contains a license that stipulates that README must be included with the distribution if any source is distributed. Right, minor point, but something to clean up in a next release -- although I'd like to think that it also illustrates that the license in the jpeglib header should be clearer. lcms is MIT licensed, the png license doesn't seem to allow binary distribution at all -- the permissions it gives are for source. On the other hand, the use of the code as a component in a product is encouraged -- that suggests binary use is ok, but it's not exactly explicit. Tiff is MIT again (when I say "MIT" I mean "Simple permissive 1-clause, possibly with a restriction on endorsement") and libz is also permissive. So just one minor blot.

Anyway, a tip of the hat to Gábor for doing it right (and doing the right thing) and I wish him lots of success with his project.