You just made me snort my coffee. THANK YOU.
@patdavid, Thank you! I don’t think they are looking for anything too fancy. Simply “I’m the developer and I approve of your use of this software within the National Park Service” is about all they need. Sadly, most open source is the work of many, many people… so without a “foundation” or other construct, it’s hard to get a definitive letter from just one person. Hence the GPL license.
I think our IT leadership just needs to read the GPL front to back, and move on to more important things, like setting up a packet sniffer and seeing what servers the software might be trying to dial out to, etc… you know, look for security issues, not whether a team of collaborating developers are going to lawyer up when their obviously free software is… free. See also: GPL3 license, as stated…
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@Entropy512, I’m here: Lava Beds National Monument and Tule Lake National Monument, in very northeastern California. Shenandoah is amazing, I miss that part of the country (I’m a wandering east-coaster).
I’m trying to save tax payers a lot of money by using RawTherapee vs. Lightroom, ShotCut vs. Premier, Krita vs. Photoshop, and Inkscape vs. Illustrator. Inkscape and GIMP are already approved in the NPS, but not the others. Just trying to get the NPS modernized a bit more.
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The deeply obscured point in my reply was that if the process requires some random self-professed Tom, Dick or Harry from Europe to send an email or write a post on some forum which carries any weight with the federal government of the United States over the one thing that actually bares all the weight - the licence - then the process is completely broken. The licence is there for a reason. The licence was written by actual law-savvy people from an actual organization, and anyone who contributes to RawTherapee or uses RawTherapee must abide by it. What any of us write in an email is irrelevant.
Good luck with your quest to get the government to use more open-source software!
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You are 100% correct in this. Thank you.
As one of the FOSS developers have already responded to this silly request, it sounds like IT staff just want “personal amplification” of the GPL for no stated or logical reason. Yup. It’s all in the GPL…
A worthy cause indeed. Best of luck!
Howdy! Still waiting to hear back, but my assumption is that RawTherapee will be approved, I provided ample documentation and other related things (InkScape, GIMP) have been approved for many years.
I’ll let everyone know when the National Park Service officially approves it…
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That would be great 
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