[cups.general] licence issue

[Michael Sweet]

On May 10, 2011, at 1:01 PM, Marc Bohets wrote:
> ...
> To my surprise, they replied that they used to have such a very user friendly all in one driver/CUPS/SANE/FAX installation system, but it has been discontinued because CUPS developpers did not allow this kind of installation files, because in violation with the GPL.

That isn't exactly true.

At the time Brother was providing source code with a binary-only compression library that linked against GPL bits (libcupsimage) in CUPS. This violated the terms of the license and we notified them in order to get them to provide source for the binary-only library or to stop linking with the GPL bits. Since then the license of the libcupsimage library has changed to LGPL2, so there is no reason they can't provide binary driver packages today.

(This is still non-optimal since many architectures will remain unsupported so long as vendors do not open source all of their driver code...)

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Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer, PWG Chair