New Glimpse NX will use permissive license, why?

2020-07-24

Glimpse is a photoeditor program, forked from GIMP, simple because they didn't find the name politically correct. They renamed it to Glimpse. And now they work on a new app, called Glimpse NX. /The new app will be “written from the ground up”, be permissively licensed, and made available across operating systems./ (source: OMGUbuntu)

I warned people a few weeks or days ago, that the free software community is changing in a way, we might not like it. They are chaging language (you might heard of it). Then one day we might wake up that they changed the license. Well we are getting close to something similar.

Glimpse is essentially abandoning their original fork, and creating a new app from scratch, with a permissive license. At first this looks like just another project. But GIMP still exist by name, and with the fork they attacked that name and the project, who weren't willing to change the name.

Now with their new project, they are willing to use a permissive license, which might be just enough to close the source. Usually a license's permissive nature means that the author(s) can close the source code.

I wouldn't be surprise if that would be their aim. First tarnish a long standing free software project because of stupid name reasons (see GIMP is just an acronym and their is a difference between GIMP and gimp), now their fork is basically abandoned and starting a new project with the same name and a new license, that can be closed. Pretty shady if you ask me.

Better to keep on eye on this Glimpse NX thing. Who knows what will happen?

This was day 44 of #100DaysToOffload, where we write about different things on our personal blogs. Join the project or just read the blogs (we have RSS and coookiez!).