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Bug#696539: marked as done (ghostscript: Ghostscript's parent company claims copyright for all PostScript files produced by GS)

Your message dated Thu, 18 Jul 2013 11:01:11 +0200
with message-id <CA+7wUsz8Y3muScuqD6fS7TW4ZCaWiOrHoQrCpZNfYwHzQ_T1pQ@mail.gmail.com>
and subject line Copyright (C) 2010 Artifex Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
has caused the Debian Bug report #696539,
regarding ghostscript: Ghostscript's parent company claims copyright for all PostScript files produced by GS
to be marked as done.

This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.

(NB: If you are a system administrator and have no idea what this
message is talking about, this may indicate a serious mail system
misconfiguration somewhere. Please contact owner@bugs.debian.org
immediately.)


-- 
696539: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=696539
Debian Bug Tracking System
Contact owner@bugs.debian.org with problems
--- Begin Message --- 
Package: ghostscript
Version: 8.71~dfsg2-9
Severity: important

pdf2ps, which is a frontend to gs, inserts a copyright notice in all PS files it produces. Files look like this:

%!PS-Adobe-3.0
....
%%Creator: GPL Ghostscript 871 (pswrite)
....
%%BeginProlog
% This copyright applies to everything between here and the %%EndProlog:
% Copyright (C) 2010 Artifex Software, Inc.  All rights reserved.
%%BeginResource: procset GS_pswrite_2_0_1001 1.001 0
....
%%EndProlog
....
%%EOF

(Needless to say, the files get corrupted if you delete the Prolog stuff.)

This is a serious issue on multiple counts:

(i) The idea itself is ghastly! It is like ImageMagick Studio LLC claiming copyright for new files everytime you use `convert' (which, thankfully, is not the case). And it may be even worse. Depending on where all gs inserts the copyright notice, it may be equivalent to emacs claiming copyright for all your code!

(ii) Why is the information about this missing _everywhere_? Nothing in man pages, nothing in /usr/share/doc/ghostscript/, nothing on gs homepages (http://www.ghostscript.com and http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ .)

And finally, 
(iii) Why is gs a part of Debian? Am I supposed to check files with a hexeditor after every change I make to every file? If I understand the issue correctly, it is a serious mistake on the part of Debian maintainers.


P.S.: Someone on #debian at irc.debian.org said that the notice is not inserted when using the upcoming version 9.17 of gs. (available in wheezy; the latest version for stable is 8.71) 

[ Copied from my message to the debian-user list.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2012/12/msg00912.html ]


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0.6
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_US.UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages ghostscript depends on:
ii  debconf [de 1.5.36.1                     Debian configuration management sy
ii  debianutils 3.4                          Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii  gsfonts     1:8.11+urwcyr1.0.7~pre44-4.2 Fonts for the Ghostscript interpre
ii  libc6       2.11.3-4                     Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libgs8      8.71~dfsg2-9                 The Ghostscript PostScript/PDF int

ghostscript recommends no packages.

ghostscript suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information

--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- 
fixed 696539 ghostscript/9.05~dfsg-7
thanks

I cannot reproduce it with current ps2ps. Closing.

--- End Message ---
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