Leading-edge ghostscript goes GPL [LWN.net]

Ghostscript has long been developed under a two-license scheme: new work would appear in a non-free release, then be placed under the GPL one year later. No longer: Ghostscript hacker Raph Levien has announced that the current development version of Ghostscript is now GPL-licensed. Note that distributors tend to ship a third branch of Ghostscript based on the (older) GPL version, so it may be a little while before the leading-edge makes it into distributions. (Thanks to Kurt Pfeifle).

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Leading-edge ghostscript goes GPL

Posted Jun 15, 2006 19:04 UTC (Thu) by brother_rat (subscriber, #1895) [Link]

This is great news. Ghostscript is just one of those things were having a single canonical version would make life so much easier for lots of people. Because ghostscript tends to "hide" behind other programs the subtle differences between the three branches can lead to surprising bugs.

I suffered recently with pdflatex generating invalid output files on one box but not the other. Turned out one had afpl gs and the other esp gs.

Leading-edge ghostscript goes GPL

Posted Jun 15, 2006 19:45 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link]

Which one was generating the invalid files? (and why?) Just curious, as this might bite me too eventually.

Leading-edge ghostscript goes GPL

Posted Jun 15, 2006 23:31 UTC (Thu) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

Strage, because pdflatex does not use ghostscript. My guess is you had some batch conversion of eps pictures which ended up using ghostscript.

Leading-edge ghostscript goes GPL

Posted Jun 16, 2006 9:46 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The post-dvips printing path often uses Ghostscript (indeed sometimes it uses *two* different branches, if the distributor is trying to keep espgs in a little box labelled 'CUPS raster'... :)

... not that I'm entirely sure when CUPS raster stuff kicks in in any case. It doesn't seem to be invoked at all in my printing path, to a Samsung mono PCL laser: flow goes from dvips-emitted PostScript through the ps2ps filter and then directly to pxlmono... well, OK, in cups-1.2rc3 it went from dvips-emitted PostScript and *crashed* the ps2ps filter. Oops. :)

Wonderful

Posted Jun 18, 2006 7:16 UTC (Sun) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

This is fantastic for projects like Scribus. The Scribus project has had to advise users to download and compile their own GhostScript, as gs 7.0.7 was hopelessly buggy and limited for many of the things we require, and even 8.14 had some known problems. Having the latest under the GPL is very nice, as it'll make it easier for distros to keep it up to date and consequently cut a significant amount of repetitive mailing list traffic and duplicate bugs.

This should benefit the GhostScript folks too - as they're still dual-licensing, and now they should see more testing and more interest in contributing to the mainline.

I really do hope the ESP folks work with them to get the ESP GS fork merged, as the miserable state of ESP GS (mostly because of its gs7 base) has been a constant source of frustration for apps that generate anything but the most trivial PostScript.

ringerc, why do you badmouth ESP Ghostscript?

Posted Jun 19, 2006 12:30 UTC (Mon) by kobserver (guest, #30087) [Link]

I wonder why you keep ranting about ESP Ghostscript 7.0.7, ringerc, when ESP Ghostscript 8.15.1 is already out since 9 months, and 8.15.2 since two!

Also, you don't seem to have any idea about the general benefits of ESP Ghostscript versions above their same-versioned GNU/GPL editions: they have less bugs (much less bugs!), they have more "devices" for legacy printer support (315 devices for ESP GS, 150 devices for AFPL GS) -- and especially, they are the only ones which have support for the "-sDEVICE=cups" parameter (without which you won't be able to print to lots of printer types).

Your bad-mouthing of ESP GS amounts to pure FUD, as long as you don't point out which specific bugs you are talking about. Where are your bug reports to the ESP GS bug tracker??

The only things you seem interested in are the improved PDF features that are available in the 8.5x series of Ghostscript. Due to the previous licensing, these were not available in ESP GS. This hopefully changes now within a short time.

I can see why you are so wild to have GS 8.54 available as soon as possible for your Scribus pet project. I'm wild for it as well, because their advanced PDF support indeed *is* cool. But that's no reason for me to rant about "bugs in ESP Ghostscript" which are not there!