Re: New CUPS license violates DFSG 6?
Jeff Licquia wrote:
...
It is weird. I think they would have been better off just
dual-licensing with a non-free Mac-specific license; they hold the full
copyright, after all.
OTOH, I think I know where this is coming from. Apple really seems to
like CUPS, and is paying Easy Software Products mondo buckage (at least,
I hope so :-) to get it to play nice with OS X. They're probably a
little skittish about the (L)GPL license terms, and the EasySW people
would be placating them.
Well, it isn't a huge amount of money, but it at least pays for the
support we'll be giving them and should allow us to get another
person working on CUPS full-time.
The license exception is there specifically so that MacOS and Darwin
developers can link against libcupsimage or derive their own code
from various parts of CUPS without worrying about the GPL or
licensing CUPS themselves. The wording should not (and I don't
see how it does) restrict use in any way - it just provides
relaxed licensing terms when using it on one platform, with the
rest enjoying the GPL/LGPL licensing CUPS has used for a while.
(I would guess that would make the CUPS license a BSD/GPL/LGPL-like
license... :)
If there is a problem with the wording for the Apple exception,
please let me know and point out the specific text that is at
issue, and make suggestions if you have them. Both us (ESP) and
Apple want to keep CUPS open-sourced and free...
--
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products mike@easysw.com
Printing Software for UNIX http://www.easysw.com
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