AA. Fedora is not (at this time) concerned about license compatibility issues arising from the relicensing of CUPS to Apache 2.0, in as much as this applies to linking of components together (our use case).
BB. If you are planning on (or have) copying code from CUPS and including it in a GPLv2 only licensed work, seek legal counsel, that is a more complicated scenario that Fedora does not face right now (as far as I know).
On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 3:43 AM, Zdenek Dohnal zdohnal@redhat.com wrote:
On 02/26/2018 03:45 PM, Gerald B. Cox wrote:
I must be missing something.... what is sad? It has been stated that CUPS does not need any GPLv2 only component for building or linking.
The issue is about packages, which have GPLv2only license and they need CUPS libraries for building or linking.
Tom's comment stated:
"Thus, pretty much everyone is in agreement that GPLv3 + Apache 2.0 is a fine combination. If the combination is GPLv2 or later, then you can resolve any concerns about compatibility between GPLv2 and Apache 2.0 by using the GPLv3 license in situations where that work is combined with an Apache 2.0 work."
and
"As far as LGPL compatibility goes, because the LGPL provides permission for anyone to use the LGPL work under the terms of the GPL (section 3 of the LGPLv2 and section 2.b of the LGPLv3). LGPLv2 permits the terms of GPLv2 or GPLv3 (or any future version of GPL) to be applied in place of the LGPLv2 terms. LGPLv3 permits the terms of GPLv3 to be applied in place of the LGPLv3 terms. Thus, LGPLv2 + Apache 2.0 _and_ LGPLv3 + Apache 2.0 are considered compatible."
So what's the issue?
I think the problem's description lies lower in Tom's email - begins "So, that leaves us with GPL version 2 (only) and Apache 2.0. In this scenario, it is worth noting a few things:"
Thanks for the reply. To me however, Tom's summary indicates this isn't really an issue for Fedora and shouldn't hamper the packaging of CUPS 2.3 - As he concludes:
AA. Fedora is not (at this time) concerned about license compatibility issues arising from the relicensing of CUPS to Apache 2.0, in as much as this applies to linking of components together (our use case).
BB. If you are planning on (or have) copying code from CUPS and including it in a GPLv2 only licensed work, seek legal counsel, that is a more complicated scenario that Fedora does not face right now (as far as I know).
As I understand the issue - this is only related to a few projects that are GPLv2 and are using CUPS in such a way that causes license issues. If that is the case they should simply change their license to GPLv2 or later. It's that simple. In other words, the onus to fix the issue lies with the projects that are using GPLv2 - not CUPS. If they don't want to change their license, going forward they shouldn't be using cups.