ghostscript to no longer be free

heads up for future ghostscript porting/packaging ... make sure the right version is used.

GNU and Ghostscript part ways
http://lwn.net/Articles/32333/
[edited for brevity and the removal of some political posturing]

The recently announced GNU Ghostscript 7.07 release will be the last. GNU Ghostscript - a free PostScript and PDF interpreter which lurks at the core of free print systems worldwide - is the result of several years worth of cooperation between its developers and the Free Software Foundation. Disagreements over the best way to create free software have brought an end to that cooperation - and to GNU Ghostscript. Fortunately, users of GPL-licensed Ghostscript should see little, if any, change.

New Ghostscript developments are released under the Aladdin Free Public License (AFPL), which is not a free license. It gives users the right to use, modify, and distribute copies of AFPL Ghostscript - with an important restriction:

  Distribution of the Program or any work based on the Program by a   commercial organization to any third party is prohibited if any payment   is made in connection with such distribution, whether directly (as in   payment for a copy of the Program) or indirectly (as in payment for some   service related to the Program, or payment for some product or service   that includes a copy of the Program "without charge"; these are only   examples, and not an exhaustive enumeration of prohibited activities).

In other words, the Ghostscript copyright holder (artofcode LLC) reserves the right to make money from the distribution of Ghostscript. If you want to distribute AFPL Ghostscript as part of a commercial product (i.e. inside a printer), you must come to an agreement with Artifex Software, which handles these deals.

The difference in viewpoints between the FSF and the Ghostscript team have resulted in two issues which have, at this point, brought about the end of the GNU Ghostscript releases. The first is the FSF's insistence that nothing in GNU Ghostscript can even mention that AFPL Ghostscript exists. This is not a new situation - see this note from Richard Stallman in response to the GNU Ghostscript 5.10 release announcement back in 1998. That announcement mentioned AFPL Ghostscript 5.50, which was set to become GNU Ghostscript 5.50 several months later; this mention violated the FSF's rules on information control and had to be corrected. More recently, Mr. Stallman told the Ghostscript developers that there were "major and pervasive problems" with the GNU Ghostscript release.

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Ghostscript users may not notice the difference, however. Given that each side continues to express great respect for the other and the two remain on friendly terms, there is a real possibility that things could yet be worked out in the future. In the mean time, as Mr. Levien told us: "...while we are discontinuing the GNU affiliation, our commitment to GPL releases of Ghostscript is as strong as ever." GNU Ghostscript will, in the future, bear a name like "GPL Ghostscript," and it will not be considered as part of the body of GNU code. But the GPL-licensed Ghostscript releases - a valuable gift of high-quality code - will continue.

jose nazario, ph.d.			jose@monkey.org
					
http://monkey.org/~jose/