Re: [Gimp-user] 'Legal' questions about GIMP (CLA, trademark and maintainer)

[Tobias Jakobs <tobias jakobs gmail com>]

Am Mo., 27. Mai 2019 um 18:43 Uhr schrieb Gabriel CANIVET <
gabriel canivet imt-atlantique net>:

> Hello,
> I am a French engineering student and I'm currently working on a
> presentation of the ecosystem around GIMP for my Software Economy course.
> I found most of my answers on gimp.org and other websites but i am still
> clueless for a few questions (three plus a bonus one to be exact).
> I hoped to find some answers here. I am not sure this is the right place
> to ask these questions but maybe someone could direct me to a better place
> if it isn't.
>
> 1. Is there any contributor license agreement (CLA) to GIMP ?


No.


> Or in another words who own the source code of GIMP, each individual
> contributor or an sole entity?

Each individual owns the source code of GIMP.


> 2. Is GIMP a trademark ? Is there any restrictions about using the name
> GIMP for other softwares?

No.

3. How did Michael Natterer become the current maintainer ? Is he only a
> big contributor to GIMP or does he have more rights than other, and if it
> is, who gave him those rights?

He is the biggest contributor to GIMPfor years and has a lot of respect in
the community. Have a look at the numbers:
https://www.openhub.net/p/gimp/contributors?query=&time_span=&sort=commits



> And lastly another less important question :
> 4. What is the exact relationship between the GNOME Foundation and GIMP ?
> On one hand the website gimp.org tell that there is no foundation or
> company behind GIMP but on the other hand the GNOME Foundation is hosting
> several parts of the GIMP project (mailing lists, repositories and
> donations).

Some history:
Gimp was first developed with Motif as UI toolkit. Motif was not open
source. That's why the GIMP developers created GTK (GIMP Tool Kit)
KDE was developed with Qt as UI toolkit, but Qt was not open source at that
time. That's why GNOME was started to get an complete OSS desktop. GNOME
chooses GTK as toolkit.
That's the main reason, why they share so much infrastructure.

GIMP has no foundation but people asked for donating to GIMP. To make that
easy the GNOME foundation cares about the GIMP money. As far as I know, the
GIMP team pays for this service and the infrastructur.

Regards,
Tobias