[cups] CUPS License Change Coming

[Michael Sweet]

Narcis,

> On Nov 8, 2017, at 11:04 AM, Narcis Garcia <informatica at actiu.net> wrote:
> 
> With Apache license, you're not required to distribute the source code
> of covered work. This makes CUPS change not good towards FOSS, as
> modified versions of CUPS can be distributed without releasing modified
> version of source code.
> 
> This opens door to insecure derivatives or forks.

Honestly, nothing actually prevented this with the prior license, and *every* Linux distribution, *BSD derivative, etc. ships a slightly different fork of CUPS already.  We (Apple/me) try to work with everyone that is packaging or bundling CUPS to make sure that we get changes back to incorporate into CUPS (particularly for security issues) and that they incorporate the latest CUPS (or at least the latest security) changes into their fork of CUPS.  It's a lot of work, but I *think* we've been able to keep the version skew to a minimum.

> If CUPS project needs different licensed components to be linked, there
> is LGPL for this too.

That still has issues, particularly with (L)GPL 2<->3 incompatibilities.

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Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer