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The license for Ghostscript is ONLY GPL if the rest of the stuff it is being shipped with is GPL, otherwise you need a commercial license. So if they want to ship Ghostscript using the GPL license then that means the whole voting machine software has to be GPL. http://www.artifex.com/indexlicense.htm

Check out http://www.artifex.com/indexlicense.htm

They dual-license the software under their own license for commerical (non-GPL-compliant use); and under the GPL for free.

Note that this is GPL and not LGPL. Even if they use an unmodified version of Ghostscript, if the voting machines are using the Ghostscript API then the voting software must itself be licensed under the GPL.

Alternatively, they can get a license from Artifex for commercial distribution, which means their application doesn't have to be under the GPL.

Obviously the voting machine software isn't GPLd, therefore they need a commercial license. The existence of this suit suggests Diebold didn't obtain a commercial license, but their distribution doesn't comply with the terms of the GPL.

It took a while, but I finally found what was confusing me. It's ghostscript. As I sort of vaguely recalled, ghostscript is not initially a GPL product. Instead, new releases are released under something called the AFPL which constrains commercial use. Later -- one release behind -- they are released under GPL. I don't know whether the link to Adobe is only in my imagination. Probably it is. Maybe it's not. I'm not sure that I care very much.

CUPS used to have its very own version of ghostscript. I recall it to have some monumentally confusing (to me anyway) licensing verbiage. I think they now use the GPL version

See http://www.artifex.com/licensing/index.htm

From the point of view of the manufacturer, they will have to go to the owner of the copyright of the code in question, and negotiate a seperate license.

For example:
http://www.sleepycat.com/company/licensing.html
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/licenses/lice nsing/licensingoverview
http://www.artifex.com/licensing/index.htm

• OSDL
• Sendmail
• Eclipse
• Ghostscript

I realize that this doesn't answer the question of whether the GPL itself allows this kind of dual license

Hasn't hurt Ghostscript that I'm aware of.

Ghostscript comes to mind; there are two separate licenses: the AFPL license requires a fee and is necessary if you are commerically distributing Ghostscript. If not distributing commerically, you can instead use the standard GPL license. The author has done very well for himself using this "dual license" model.

The main issue there seems to be informed consent, that is, do community contributors understand that their contributions may be used to generate revenue for someone else? I think we can all agree that it would be deceptive to represent software as GPLed and accept free submissions without informing contributors of the commercial licensing of their contributions.

Ghostscript is an example of a GPL'ed Free Software program that provides its primary author with a source of revenue from proprietary licensing.

Thanks for the reference! I see a general description of commercial licensing, but so far I haven't been able to find the modifications to the GPL that assign all modifications back to the owners of Ghostscript. Could you provide a quote or specific pointer, and explain how informed consent for contributing changes works here?

Software under Mozilla-style licenses requires ownership of published modifications to be assigned to the originator. Netscape/AOL/Time-Warner owns all modifications to Mozilla.

I can't find such a provision for assignment of modifications in the Mozilla Public License. Again, could you please provide specifics, and explain how informed consent is obtained?

Thanks, Tim

Just a note: Aladdin GhostScript is free (as in beer and partially as in speech) for commercial use. The limitation is that only Aladdin can charge money for distributing modifications to the source. Read it here.

After a certain amount of time, source is relicensed under GPL (and here we have GNU GhostScript), so Aladdin basically sells the fact it stays ahead in development, while also pleasing RMS (who, you'll agree with me, is not so easy to please).

Abisource developers could agree to do something similar in the future, and perhaps earn some money (provided people out there are willing to pay for creepy featurism).

About Framemaker: I use it for large technical documents (600+ pages on HP-UX) and I really like it. But for the use I make of FrameMaker, I could as well use LyX without any problem. Frames in FrameMaker are a nice plus over LyX, but you'll agree with me that you can't do serious DTP with them anyway, and they are mostly used exactly as LyX floats...