Does the Gimp have patent issues with its layers?

General Forums Off-topic Chat
1

Hello everyone,
I was talking with another person, and I was told that Adobe patented their layers system. According to this person, the Gimp might be infringing on this patent by using the layer system that it has.

Does anyone have any information on this?

Thanks,
Clean3d

2

were that the case, Paint.NET, PSP, and many many others would be infringing as well, but PSP and GIMP have been around for such a long time, that even if it’s true, Adobe probably won’t make any moves.

3

I think he could be refering the the specific type of layer sytem (coding?) employed be Adobe. Although, I don’t know anything about this. Would be interesting to find out - and very sad, cuase its a very good system.

4

and what damages are they going to sue for? there is no way they could prove that they lost sales because of Gimp. And no jury would find for Goliath over David. And I seriously doubt that they stole the code from Adobe. And the whole trashcan debate starts. However, if they have a patent on such a system, they have the right to collect royalties for everyone that infringes afterward.

5

Gimps current layer system is going away very soon.

6

roger and ebow: GIMP wouldn’t have to use Adobe’s code to be infringing.

7

Now this sounds interesting. What are they going to replace it with?

8

Gimp is going to be using a node based system much like Blender’s. It’s part of GEGL which is now functional. After Gimp 2.4 is released it’s devs are going to start to fold in GEGL elements. It will take a while to be fully implemented, but when they’re done, Gimp will be more powerfull than any bitmap editor out right now.

9

really? but will it be usable?

it sounds like it has promise, but i am always sceptical of open source user interfaces… (unless that was the core value of the open source application being designed)

Alltaken

10

I was thinking more along the lines of functionality then UI. Sorry if my post was misleading.