+++ Raj Mathur [2007-07-13 18:18:11]:
On Friday 13 July 2007 14:07, Kingsly John wrote:
[snip]
Apple bought over the company that held all the copyrights to the
CUPS code. Individual contributors to the CUPS project had to
handover copyrights to that company for their patches to be
accepted.(Similar to what FSF recommends for their projects.)
That totally sucks. Fortunately FSF only recommends handing over the
copyright to them, making it mandatory (didn't MySQL do that too?) is
dangerous in the extreme, as this case emphasises.
Apple has already had a special clauses put into the license for CUPS
on OS X.(contributors didn't have to GPL their OS X specific
drivers).
Now they can legally have an internal non-GPL fork/dual-licensed
branch and not share code with the community.
If it's internal it doesn't matter what license it's under -- even with
GPL, if you distribute the binaries internally you don't need to
provide sources.
Or do you mean an OS/X-specific branch which Apple can distribute
binary-only to their clients? Not splitting hairs, just curious.
Yeah that's I meant, but whats worse is if all future development happens on
an internal branch and the public cvs only gets a patch *after* it has been
released on OS X as one of the zillion new features. (I think that is how
all the other open source projects from Apple currently work)
Either way the development process will become less transparent than at
present knowing SJ's penchant for secrecy.
Apple has already had special exemptions/licensing from Easy Software
Products for a long time now (5+ years)
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/05/msg00033.html
So it's also possible that Apple saw the threat of some other company taking
over Easy Software Products and holding them to ransom by revoking the
Apple specific exemptions, which would affect not just their own work but
also third party drivers/filters etc. And did the best thing to safeguard
their interests.
Kingsly
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