[cups] documentation and no response

kalle kalle at projektwerkstatt.de
Thu Nov 2 08:29:52 PDT 2017


thank you for your answering, Michael

>> On Oct 28, 2017, at 6:12 AM, kalle <kalle at projektwerkstatt.de> wrote:
>>> ...
>>> Yes, it is part of the CUPS source code and covered by the GPL
(version 2).
>>
>> What confuses me is that, when I visit the site
>> `www.cups.org/documentation.html', the only reference, which prompts to
>> my eyes is the line at the bottom, telling
>>
>> "Copyright © 2007-2017 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. CUPS, the CUPS
>> logo, and macOS are trademarks of Apple Inc. All other trademarks are
>> the property of their respective owners."
>>
>> From this alone I would deduce that the at least the documentation is
>> proprietary, if not the whole software.

>That very page has a link labeled:

>    Software License Agreement

>which takes you to the CUPS license (GPL2 + LGPL2, depending on the
part of the software...)  That plus the banner on the home page saying
that "CUPS is the standards-based, open source printing system developed
by Apple Inc..." with a link to the Github repository (which also
includes the web site code...) should provide a clue that the software
and documentation is not proprietary.

it provides a clue, but if I wouldn't find more hints I wouldn't believe
that it's not proprietary.

>I'll note that prior to Apple buying CUPS in 2007, the web site carried
a similar copyright notice for the previous owner (Easy Software
Products, my old company), all while still offering CUPS under the same
licensing terms.  The copyright notice tells you the owner of the site.
 "All rights reserved" is standard language for "unless otherwise
specified, we don't grant permission to reproduce what we have
provided".  And the CUPS license agreement does exactly that (providing
the content until the terms of the GPL2 and LGPL2).

In this case, not only the owner of the site is marked, but also that
"CUPS, the CUPS logo and macOS are trademarks of APPLE Inc.".
It may be that "All rights reserved" is standard language, but  why not
also mention the distribution mode under the CUPS-License there?
To me this "standard language" makes the impression of keeping me away
from usage.

Also, if one does not look in the sources (as happened to me), it is not
clear, that the documentation also falls under the license. This could
be better noted, for example in cups.org/help under the "Help"-header.
Furthermore, the manpages provided by CUPS also claim APPLEs copyrights
while not mentioning GPL/LGPL etc.

>....

>That said, I understand you are disappointed that the old monolithic
documentation was phased out 12 or 13 years ago in favor of short help
documents and man pages, and that you feel that something is missing,
but so far I haven't heard exactly what you feel is missing from the
current documentation.  That at least would provide us with something we
might be able to act on, vs. pointing you at the current documentation
and explaining to you why the old documentation was dropped.

In my last mail I wrote:
"In the documentation "https://www.cups.org/documentation.html" I
assume beginners start with the section "Getting Started" and not with
the part "Man Pages", where the sections have strange names which don't
tell you what you need. So IMO it would make sense to introduce the
command `lpadmin' to the article "Command-Line Printing and Options",
while for full documentation refering to the man-page.
I think that the document "Command-Line Printing and Options" has an
introductory quality, not being a full documentation. How to install
printers should be referred to somewhere there, since you cannot print
without administration."

greetings,
kalle


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