[cups.general] licence issue

Michael Sweet msweet at apple.com
Thu May 12 10:00:17 PDT 2011


On May 12, 2011, at 9:36 AM, Marc Bohets wrote:

>> 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...)
>> 
>> ________________________________________________________________________
>> Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer, PWG Chair
>> 
> I agree that the best solution would be a completely open source solution.
> But as I am not a Brother representative, just a linux user who bought a Brother printer, I cannot decide that for them.
> 
> So if I understand it correctly, providing Brother does not object, I could package myself in a single deb file the combination of the different deb Brother printer driver files with the GNU CUPS wrappers and a little configuration script that sets up IP adressing as wel, and try to add it to the Ubuntu non free repositories, or perhaps better contribute it to Debian as it is the source for Ubuntu, if their policies allow it.
> 
> This would give non technical linux users a user friendly install experience,
> and for myself, a nice motivation/purpose to start with SW packaging.
> 
> Does this look legally OK, or am I overlooking things ?

Based on my analysis of their drivers several years ago, yes.

________________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer, PWG Chair





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