Apple acquires CUPS source

[Charlton Wilbur]

On Jul 12, 2007, at 12:36 PM, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

>
> On 13 juil. 07, at 01:08, Matt Johnston wrote:
>
>> CUPS was GPL/LGPL and was owned by Michael R. Sweet. Now it's  
>> owned by Apple so any pesky changes to the GPL won't hinder them  
>> in future. And they can get rid of the "bran" interface to CUPS  
>> and make it all shiny shiny...
>
> CUPS is _still_ GPL/LGPL. Where did you see the license had changed ?
>
> Plus, it is licensed under the (L)GPL 2 strictly (as far as I've  
> seen). So no possibility to have a third party relicense it to GPLv3.

Apple is no longer a third party; Apple is the copyright owner, and  
can choose to license subsequent versions under any license it  
chooses.  This is the only reason to acquire a GPL'd project: so you  
don't have to conform to the GPL.

Any currently GPL'd code will remain GPL'd, but any new Apple  
development can (and probably will) be closed, and not re-submitted  
to the community.

And before you go throwing words like "theft" around -- it's not  
theft when the rightful owner agrees to transfer his ownership.

> What benefit would a BSD license here ?

Apple wouldn't have to buy the rights from the owner to avoid  
releasing its modifications.  This is more likely to lead to a source  
tree with public free bits and private proprietary bits that benefit  
each other, as can be seen with the BSDs and OS X, as opposed to this  
situation, which is likely to lead to a total project fork.

Charlton


-- 
Charlton Wilbur
cwilbur at gmail.com
cwilbur at chromatico.net