+++ 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 -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kingsly At Users Dot SourceForge Dot Net -- http://kingsly.org/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Linux-india-general mailing list Linux-india-general@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-india-general
