[cups-devel] CUPS License Change Coming

Zdenek Dohnal zdohnal at redhat.com
Thu Nov 30 04:42:41 PST 2017


On 11/09/2017 08:34 AM, Zdenek Dohnal wrote:
>
> Thank you, Mike. I'll gather the input (we are discussing this issue on
> Fedora developers list) and as IANAL I'll wait for Fedora legal guys
> opinion on this issue (Solomon has started discussion already). Then
> I'll send it to you.
>
Hi Mike,

I got a word from person who is more competent in licenses than me and
he said the change to Apache 2.0 license is compatible for most GPL/LGPL
licenses, except for GPLv2 only license. For GPLv2 only + Apache 2.0
scenario the intent of the upstream copyright holders matters.
Whole paragraph what he said:

The intent of the upstream copyright holders matters when determining
compatibility. If both upstreams believe their licensing to be
compatible, and document this, it will have an impact on the practical
compatibility of combining the works.

So as you wrote several emails before, software under GPLv2 only can
dynamically link CUPS library, because CUPS library can be marked as
OS-supplied library - which makes software+licenses compatible, if
upstream holder of SW, which wants to dynamically link CUPS, see it as
compatible as well.
Can we agree on exact sentence, which should be added to
copyright/license file of software under GPLv2 only license and wants to
link against CUPS library? Something like:

"This software is permitted to link against CUPS library, because CUPS
is considered as OS-supplied library and therefore it falls under Apache
Software License 2.0 exception."

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




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