On Sat, Jul 14, 2007 at 02:38:14PM -0400, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote: > I'm familiar with apsfilter and actually just got it to work with this > printer on my debian box with debian's stock gs-gpl. > > Part of my reason for asking on OBSD is that I'm exploring the larger > issue of licensing. I know that OBSD folk tend to prefer stuff with a > BSD license rather than that GPL.
Only because they're in the business of making and distributing free operating systems. GPL software makes it difficult to distribute compiled binaries (because you must comply with GPL constraints on source distribution), and in turn restricts people who are making and distributing products derived from OpenBSD. BSD takes a very "free" definition of "free", which includes "you are free to take this stuff and turn it into a product, sell it, and not give your customers the source code". For example, Microsoft took the Windows TCP/IP stack from BSD - they couldn't have used the Linux one. So, the BSD licence is much more generous than GPL. However, if you are an end-user, and don't intend packaging or selling your own product which includes this functionality, then using GPL'd software is fine. In some ways it's better for you, because if you got a binary distribution and the original "vendor" goes bust, you should still have the source and be able to maintain it yourself. I agree that the apsfilter licence(*) is extremely unclear. However, it is published on the Internet for anyone to download. Do you believe the author would take you to court for not sending a postcard? Pragmatically, if the software does want you want, I suggest you could take that (minimal) risk. Or, just send the guy a postcard. He obviously likes them. Regards, Brian. (*) http://www.apsfilter.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/src/apsfilter/LICENSE?rev=1.5.2.3&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&cvsroot=apsfilter&only_with_tag=RELENG_7
