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List:       fedora-extras-list
Subject:    GSView licensing
From:       Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler () chello ! at>
Date:       2006-04-05 19:08:41
Message-ID: loom.20060405T205713-556 () post ! gmane ! org
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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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