Apple bought CUPS?!?! WTF?!?!

Post by **Patrick** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 12:11 pm

http://www.cups.org/articles.php?L475

How can Apple own GPL code?!? How long till we get a fork? I'm counting the hours. Once again Apple shows they are no friends of Open Source software.

Chess · Post by **Chess** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 12:27 pm

There are some surprisingly good Slashdot comments about this. I guess the developer and his company sold the source code, trademarks, and copyrights to Apple. The GPL does not prevent the owner of the source code and copyright from selling it. And, also interestingly enough, apparently the special Apple language in the CUPS license has been around for at least 5 years.

Slashdot:

http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/07/07/12/1342258.shtml

Debian bug tracker entry from 2002 re: Apple language in CUPS license:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/20 ... 00033.html

Post by **Patrick** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 12:30 pm

Chess wrote:There are some surprisingly good Slashdot comments about this.

Surprising because the vast majority of comments at Slashdot (and Digg) are absolutely moronic. I predict CUPS will have the same fate as XFree86. Bye, glad to know you CUPS.

Chess · Post by **Chess** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 12:31 pm

here is a good comment from slashdot:

"The GPLv2 (or LGPL) licenses do not convey copyright ownership. Even though anyone in the world is free to use/redistribute/modify/rename/etc, the source code copyright ownership is still retained by the developer that contributed the code. Some organizations require copyright assignment of code contributed into the base where the contributing developers give up their ownership of the code they created and assign their copyright to the project (or in some cases, a commercial organization). Once the developer assigns copyright over, the project/commercial organization can do whatever they want with it - including relicensing it under a completely different, closed, commercial license. I doubt however, that Apple will make any devious use of CUPS as the GPL versions are still available and could simply fork continuing with GPL. Copyright ownership does, however, make it easy for Apple to do what it wants with CUPS integration into Mac OS X without ever having to worry about the GPL license."

Post by **Patrick** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 12:42 pm

I wonder if this was preemptive move on Apple's part to avoid GPLv3? The whole patent granting language in GPLv3 might have given Apple heart palpitations.

Post by **dann** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 1:24 pm

This poses and interesting dilemma though. What if companies like Apple, Novell and Microsoft start buying up the copyrights to many of the tools used FOSS software and start forking them under a different license or keep them at gpl v2? Sure, they might not retain the girth of developers afforded in the FOSS model should they do this, but then we have a situation where a lot of the common software we use exists in different forked versions that may, later on down the line, become incompatible.

This could produce an ugly scenario. We wonder so much how the gpl v3 is going to affect those companies, now we have to wonder how it will affect FOSS overall?

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 1:31 pm

According to the CUPS site, they plan to keep CUPS as GPLv2/LGPLv2 licensed software. If Apple buys them and keeps it GPLv2, should we really expect trouble?

allix · Post by **allix** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 4:32 pm

There is just too many gpl v2 software out there, its not like the patent deal which m$ could pay say 500 distros , Also the community who develop the software will not just sell out to the highest bidder.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 4:22 am

dann wrote:This poses and interesting dilemma though. What if companies like Apple, Novell and Microsoft start buying up the copyrights to many of the tools used FOSS software and start forking them under a different license or keep them at gpl v2?

You know, the impact of such a scenario really depends on what applications it is. You can safely bet your heart muscle that the FSF will give a big and loud "NO!", to anyone who might ever come close to even attempting to buying the copyrights for glibc, GCC, and the rest of GNU.
If anyone bought the copyrights for say Firefox, people could just fork the existing source base that's under GPLv2 (Which probably wouldn't take too long, as far as folks like Debian and GNU are concerned), or dump it and contribute elsewhere. You may not prefer it, but Konqueror is a perfectly capable browser. And also at that point, the self-sustaining nature of free software would take over and come up with a "fix" to the problem.

dann wrote:Sure, they might not retain the girth of developers afforded in the FOSS model should they do this, but then we have a situation where a lot of the common software we use exists in different forked versions that may, later on down the line, become incompatible.

Well, if the FOSS community as a whole rejected a certain application, then incompatibility would be a very very small problem if you think about it, really. Say for the sake of argument, that Apple bought the rights to say Mozilla's Gecko HTML rendering engine. At that point, if the community as a whole switched to using a fork of the source base, or rallied around something like KHTML, would that truly present a problem? Not really, because the hostile party's version wouldn't be used anyway.

dann wrote:This could produce an ugly scenario. We wonder so much how the gpl v3 is going to affect those companies, now we have to wonder how it will affect FOSS overall?

You might have to go read GPLv3, as far as I see it, it's only a big deal to people who are, or at least partly, hostile towards free software.
Will Red Hat have a problem with giving a patent grant for the software they directly, or indirectly through Fedora, distribute? I seriously doubt it. The way I understand it, Sun already does it with their Common Development and Distribution (CDDL) license. IBM has already come out and said that they have no issues with GPLv3.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 11:43 am

dann wrote:This could produce an ugly scenario. We wonder so much how the gpl v3 is going to affect those companies, now we have to wonder how it will affect FOSS overall?

This has been my concern all along. I think many are way too eager to jump on the v3 bandwagon w/o thinking too much about the over effect it's going to have. I'm not saying I know, or that it's going to ultimately be bad, but I do predict some fairly major turmoil.