LWN: Comments on "GNU and Ghostscript part ways"

GNU censorship

leandro — 2003-08-07T20:49:58+00:00

> the FSF's interpretation of "not advocating" is too similar to "not mentioning in any way" for our comfort

Granted, you'd feel like that because your codebase is proprietary. Still I can see RMS' point: giving leads to non-free gives the impression GNU condones it, and helps perpetuate the proprietary evil as he (and me) sees it.

Thanks for keeping the GNU GPL release, but I'd rather you had not parted ways. Now I hope ESP Ghostscript florishes...

Move along

Peter — 2003-05-26T05:18:02+00:00

See, now, this was what *I* thought, too.

Heh. So, unlike so many things, this one isn't just you.

Move along

torsten — 2003-05-24T01:49:54+00:00

It's not like GNU Ghostscript was ever anything more than a rebranded Aladdin Ghostscript anyway.

So it may seem.

The latest release of ESP GhostScript, version 7.05.6, contains many drivers, enhancements, and improvements that have not been upstreamed to Aladdin.

GNU censorship

raph — 2003-05-23T19:43:19+00:00

I'm not trying to stir up flames, but I think the word "censorship" is appropriate here. Basically, it seemed to us that to be a GNU project, we had to excise all mentions of AFPL Ghostscript, including those through one or two hope of indirection, including our main Web page and our bug tracker.

I completely understand and support the idea of not using GNU distributions to advocate non-free software. We were trying to respect that, but the FSF's interpretation of "not advocating" is too similar to "not mentioning in any way" for our comfort.

So we interpreted censorship as censorship and routed around it :)

GNU censorship

leandro — 2003-05-23T01:10:26+00:00

> a policy of concealing the existence of non-free software

Make it not advertising. Concealing would mean trying to hide, erase all visible traces from someone; not advertising means simply ignoring.

GNU censorship

giraffedata — 2003-05-22T19:55:01+00:00

I never knew the GNU Project had a policy of concealing the existence of non-free software.

It's an offensive policy when a commercial producer actively covers up the existence of competitive products, but this is downright strange, considering the FSF's orientation toward freedom.

GNU and Ghostscript part ways

iabervon — 2003-05-22T18:02:28+00:00

It seems to me like, while the GPL is a good fit for the free version of Ghostscript, the FSF and the GNU project never really were. It seems to me like the Ghostscript developers picked an odd method of releasing the Free versions, through an unrelated organization. These days, there are plenty of ways to distribute Free (and not-quite-Free) Software, so it doesn't really make sense to go through GNU. Even MySQL, whose model Mr. Kuhn points to as preferable, isn't a GNU project.

It would greatly simplify everybody's experience if the project were more uniform, where you have a single set of version numbers for the versions, with all of the non-bug-fix, Artifex-code-only releases older than a year licensed under the GPL and the new released only license under the AFPL. This would make it much easier for users to decide what course of action is most suitable: getting the AFPL release (if the user doesn't want to use the missing freedom anyway), waiting for the current AFPL release to be GPL, getting the current GPL release, or adding functionality to the GPL release.

Move along

Baylink — 2003-05-22T16:56:42+00:00

See, now, this was what *I* thought, too.

Move along

Peter — 2003-05-22T03:13:45+00:00

In other words: move along, nothing to see here. Just a name change. It's not like GNU Ghostscript was ever anything more than a rebranded Aladdin Ghostscript anyway. Now Aladdin Ghostscript will be rebranded as something else instead.

(Then again, "Mozilla Firebird" was just a name change too.)

GNU and Ghostscript part ways

Hawke — 2003-05-22T01:18:00+00:00

The use of "i.e." should have been "e.g."

i.e. stands for "id est", and means "that is". As used in the article, it would imply that the only possible commercial distribution of AFPL Ghostscript is inside a printer.

e.g. stands for "exempli gratia", and means "for example" and implies that inside a printer is merely one of the many possibilities for commercial distribution of AFPL Ghostscript.