GSView licensing
Kevin Kofler
kevin.kofler at chello.at
Wed Apr 5 19:08:41 UTC 2006
GSView (currently in Extras) is licensed under the AFPL:
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/LICENCE
According to the FSF, this is NOT a Free Software license:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#NonFreeSoftwareLicense
In particular, it essentially prohibits commercial distribution. In the
author's own words: "AFPL Ghostscript comes with a licence that is more
restrictive than the GNU Licence; in particular, it restricts the distribution
of AFPL Ghostscript in commercial contexts.", and looking at the license (as
well as the FSF's interpretation of it which appears to match mine),
"restricts" appears to be an understatement. Each time somebody brought up that
issue, the consensus was that non-commercial-only licenses are not acceptable
in Extras (and I agree with that, Fedora aims to contain Free and Open Source
software only, non-commercial-only software is neither).
I also don't see why GSView is needed in Extras at all, given that:
* there are alternatives (with less restrictive licensing) already in Core or
Extras (e.g. Evince and KGhostview),
* it uses the obsolete GTK+ 1.2,
* repoquery --whatrequires gsview returns nothing. (At one point, LyX had a
spurious dependency on gsview, I'm glad this has been fixed.)
So IMHO, GSView should never have been accepted into Extras and should be
pulled from Extras.
Kevin Kofler
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