[cups-devel] [UNKN] STR #4337: CUPS license upgrade to GPLv2+ ?

odyx at debian.org odyx at debian.org
Mon Jan 13 08:31:31 PST 2014


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[STR New]

Hi Michael,

I know this is quite a sensitive topic but I thought asking in public
wouldn't hurt…

While we were discussing how Debian would handle the license-wise
impossibility to build CUPS against 3.x GnuTLS versions on the thread
starting on https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/01/msg00205.html ,
Daniel Kahn Gillmor suggested to ask CUPS' upstream to relicense it under
GPLv2+, so here I am.

Licensing CUPS under GPLv2+ would allow linking it against 3.x GnuTLS
versions which are incompatible with GPL-2-only softwares because libgmp is
licensed in LGPLv3+. On the other hand, while CUPS does have an OpenSSL
exception to its GPLv2 license, many software out there is licensed without
this exception, forbidding the linking of these against libcups2 if it
links with OpenSSL.

See https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/12/msg00329.html for the
start of thread discussing the status of GnuTLS in Debian.

Without a licensing of CUPS compatible with GnuTLS 3.x (in fact, with GNU
MP), the situation essentially boils down to either:
a) keep linking CUPS with the deprecated GnuTLS 2.x and hope it stays
around;
b) link CUPS with OpenSSL and ask all software upstreams linking against
libcups2 (and the software that link against them) to change their licenses
to accept an (indirect) linking against OpenSSL;
c) disable CUPS's TLS support entirely.

None of these are really acceptable (or event doable in the case of b) in
my opinion; so here I am asking Apple for a license upgrade of CUPS to
GPLv2+. We will likely also ask GNU MP to revert their license upgrade,
which would also solve this problem.

As mentionned in introduction, I very much understand the sensitivity of
this topic and would perfectly understand an expeditive answer.

With my best regards,

Didier Raboud

Link: https://www.cups.org/str.php?L4337
Version: 1.7-current
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