GIMP to go (L)GPL3

According to the change notes for the current development branch the next release of the GIMP image editor will be licensed under the GPL3 and LGPL3. GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is currently being redeveloped as the unstable development version 2.7, preparing the way for version 2.8 which will be the next stable version expected for release by the end of the year.

The licence change is, of course, not the only change to the image editor. According to the release notes, the text tool will be able to perform text editing on the canvas rather than in a dialogue and GIMP resources will be taggable for easier searching; both features were developed in conjunction with the Google Summer of Code last year (GSoC 2008). The developers have also separated the activities of saving and exporting an image into different menus and ported the file plug-ins to this new export API, simplifying the export process. A new parser for size entries means that dimensions can be given in more complex ways such as "2 * 20px + 10in", freeing users from doing size calculations outside GIMP.

The developers are looking to finish merging in vector layer code from GSoC2006 and merge the GSoC2009 projects for dynamic brushes in the run up to release GIMP 2.8. GIMP 2.7 is available, as a developer snapshot, to download.

(djwm)