[cups-devel] CUPS License Change Coming

[Zdenek Dohnal]

On 11/08/2017 02:57 PM, Michael Sweet wrote:
> 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.
>
> _________________________________________________________
> Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer
>
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Hi Mike,

would you mind considering dual license - Apache License 2.0 and GPLv2+?
Because "OS-supplied library" definition is relative and it could end up
that any widely used library can be exception (not mention widely used
libraries differs across distributions - so library would be count as
"OS-supplied library" on one distro and not on a other) - and that will
lead into nullifying existing licensing rules.

-- 
Zdenek Dohnal
Associate Software Engineer
Red Hat Czech - Brno TPB-C