Thomas Klausner <tk%giga.or.at@localhost> writes: > There's the AGPL version maintained at > http://ghostscript.sourceforge.net/ or http://ghostscript.com which is > in pkgsrc as ghostscript-agpl (9.15 currently). > > Then we have a package called ghostscript-gpl, which uses the same > master site though, just an older version (9.05 currently). > > And then I found a recent announcement in gnu.announce about GNU > ghostscript-9.14 which is maintained at > http:/www.gnu.org/software/ghostscript/ > > Should we switch our ghostscript-gpl package to use that master > site/homepage and update to 9.14, or is it completely different from > what we have in the ghostscript-gpl package? The basic issue is that ghostscript used to be GPL, and upstream changed the license to AGPL. People were upset by that, so the last GPL version remains in pkgsrc, and the ghostscript meta-package defaults to it. Sometime projects use the AGPL because of deep philosophical opinions (e.g. Diaspora*). Sometimes it's part of a strategy to make use of free software more awkward for companies in order to sell them proprietary licenses. This can be hard to tease apart, but requiring inbound contributions to be under a permissive license (vs the open source norm of asking for an inbound license matching the outbound license) and offering proprietary licenses are clues. http://bugs.ghostscript.com/attachment.cgi?id=9346 http://artifex.com/page/licensing-information.html It may be that GNU ghostscript gets fixes that are not applied to the artifex version (perhaps because GNU contributors are willing to assign copyright or grant GPL licenses but not agree to the artifex CLA). Certainly 9.05 is getting crufty. One can get 9.14 from ghostscript.com with just changing the version. It is labeled as AGPL. I diffed ghostscript-9.14 (from FSF) and gnu-ghostscript-9.14 (from ghostscript.com/artifex) and the differences seem like random bugfixes. The license for gnu-ghostscript-9.14 is AGPL3, and I think it's just a website bug that it doesn't say AGPL. So I'd say that the real question is when we give up on ghostscript-9.05. I suspect there are still people who would rather use that than use the AGPL version or not use ghostscript, so I don't think we should be in a hurry to delete it (not that you suggested doing so). I think it would be good to write to the GNU ghostscript people and ask them to clarify AGPL3 vs GPL3.
Attachment:
pgplk2pN7fytk.pgp
Description: PGP signature