On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 9:53 AM, Michael Catanzaro mike.catanzaro@gmail.com wrote:
I have many questions here.
Isn't this going to require relicensing a humongous number of applications? We can't plausibly relicense so much. We would have to remove printing support from GTK+, which is not going to happen.
The system library exception might work for Fedora, but it would be unfair for us to accept a solution that likely won't work for our other friends in the free software ecosystem.
Any idea why upstream seems to think we don't have to follow the license if we use dynamic linking? It seems unlikely that this is accurate, right?
Can upstream be persuaded to go with a BSD or MIT style license instead, to avoid causing unnecessary problems for the free software community?
I suspect they want the patent termination clauses. In this age of software patent tomfoolery, I wouldn't blame them. Unfortunately, Apple has an utter hatred of licenses that enforce reciprocity, and it goes even further with licenses that prevent closed devices (aka GNU v3 license family).
Do we need to fork CUPS now?
I don't like this thought, but if this can't be resolved well, then a fork might be needed. Ideally, if they could be convinced of LGPLv2+ or ASL 2.0, then I think everyone would be satisfied.