[cups-devel] CUPS License Change Coming

[Michael Sweet]

Didier,

> On Nov 8, 2017, at 2:42 AM, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud <odyx at debian.org> wrote:
> 
> Le mardi, 7 novembre 2017, 15.05:19 h CET Michael Sweet a écrit :
>> Apple is excited to announce that starting with CUPS 2.3 we will be
>> providing CUPS under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0.
>> 
>> For more information about the Apache License, Version 2.0, please see the
>> Apache Software Foundation licenses page at:
>> 
>>    http://www.apache.org/licenses/
> 
> CUPS was so far licensed under what Debian nicknamed as "GPL-2.0 with AOSDL 
> exception"  [0] :

Right, and we've added and removed exceptions over the years to deal with license incompatibilities.

>> (…) In addition, as the copyright holder of CUPS, Apple Inc. grants  the
>> following special exception: (…)
> 
> Is Apple going with "pristine" Apache License 2.0 [1] without further 
> exceptions?

Yes, you can see the license change in the Github repository - it is already live for the master branch which is tracking CUPS 2.3.x now...

> This is going to make CUPS incompatible with GPL-2-only software 
> [2,3]. My understanding it that it doesn't affect dynamic-linking situations 
> (both software that CUPS needs, or software that need libcups*), aka not a 
> concern for distributors, but are there other potential impacts of this 
> license change that I'm missing ?

I don't think static linking against libcups is common enough to be a serious concern - CUPS is fairly ubiquitous and easily falls under the "OS-supplied library" exception in the GPL 2.  And existing GPL-2-only software that *does* statically link/copy CUPS code can continue to do so with CUPS 2.2.x and earlier.

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Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer