CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc. [LWN.net]

CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

Posted Jul 13, 2007 19:18 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263)
In reply to: CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc. by emk
Parent article: CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

What the hell?

If you assign the rights to the contributions to a company, you should expect them to use them.

Would you think the wanted them for fun? For singing "We have a million lines of code copyrighted to USSSSS"? For baking a copyright cake?

You should also remember to bitch about MySQL that sells, SELLS I TELL YOU licences. Oh and Sun, and Trolltech.

The FSF is different, they made a promise.

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CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

Posted Jul 14, 2007 2:31 UTC (Sat) by russell (subscriber, #10458) [Link]

I would have expected that the assignment of copyright was to make license administration easier. Such as changing to another "equivalent" license, i.e. GPLv3. I would not define selling to apple as "equivalent". Contributors would have every right to feel ripped off. There code has been made proprietry against there intentions. They contributed to a GPL project just to have to it sold into a potentially proprietry fork.

CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

Posted Jul 14, 2007 9:16 UTC (Sat) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link]

Then you are _very_ naive.

They wouldn't need to demand copyrights to go to GPLv3, just the "or later".

How in the world could people expect them NOT to use THEIR rights? And yes, since they were given the rights, it is THEIRS, to do as they want.

The contributor has essentially said "Do as you please", which they did. To whine about it when they do is just silly.

Please note that I'm not particularly fond of Apple's takeover, and I really hope they'll keep the contributions flowing, but I really can't blame ESP for taking a nice business opportunity.

Also note that ESP has always had a commercial product built on CUPS, the "I would have expected that the assignment of copyright was to make license administration easier." is even more naive in that context.