ImageMagick v. GraphicsMagick [LWN.net]

The GraphicsMagick project forked from ImageMagick last November with goals like "use an open development model" and "use a release process which assures a working product." Relations between the two projects have apparently not gotten any friendlier since the fork; visitors to ImageMagick.com now find a message saying that the ImageMagick files have been removed since they (it is said) contain GraphicsMagick code in violation of the license (which requires attribution). ImageMagick has been a useful toolkit for a long time; one can only hope that this issue gets worked out in the near future. (Thanks to Boris Folgmann).

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ImageMagick v. GraphicsMagick

Posted Mar 25, 2003 18:48 UTC (Tue) by bfriesen (guest, #10321) [Link]

There is no intention to start a conflict between the two groups.
Cristy (leader of ImageMagick Studio) recognizes that there is a problem.
He does not want to add the GraphicsMagick license statement to ImageMagick
so he has now commited to removing the updates from GraphicsMagick which
were commited to ImageMagick CVS and are currently present in the
ImageMagick 5.4.7 beta package. To the best of our knowlege, the current
ImageMagick 5.4.6 release does not contain any GraphicsMagick code.

ImageMagick v. GraphicsMagick

Posted Mar 25, 2003 22:19 UTC (Tue) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

Interesting, but if GraphicsMagick is a derivative work of ImageMagick, then how can they have changed the license terms?

ImageMagick v. GraphicsMagick

Posted Mar 25, 2003 22:50 UTC (Tue) by bfriesen (guest, #10321) [Link]

The ImageMagick license actually allows the code to be re-licensed under different terms, however the GraphicsMagick uses identical terms as ImageMagick's. Certainly any new code is copyright by its author.

The good news of the day is that Cristy (ImageMagick maintainer) has changed his mind and has decided to incorporate the GraphicsMagick license statement rather than backing out the incorporated changes. This will allow allow ImageMagick to copy freely from GraphicsMagick. GraphicsMagick was already able to copy freely from ImageMagick since GraphicsMagick is already dual-licensed.

ImageMagick v. GraphicsMagick

Posted Mar 27, 2003 19:36 UTC (Thu) by proxity (guest, #3475) [Link]

Very good. All files and webpages of ImageMagick are on-line again.