[gs-devel] Re: [gnu.org #2259] GNU Ghostscript 7.06 release candidate

[Ralph Giles]

On Wednesday, December 4, 2002, at 01:08  pm, Torsten Landschoff wrote:

>> We switched to the current file header to make it easier to change
>> licenses on the code, so in principle it's not a problem to revert to
>> the standard header for our farewell release. However, we feel like
>
> Pardon me, why "farewell" release?

Don't worry. Richard has recently strengthened the wording in the GNU 
coding guidelines with respect to references to non-free software, and 
asked us to comply with them as part of being a GNU project. We 
disagree with this on philosophical grounds as well as on a practical 
level. Our development codebase is under the AFPL rather than the GPL, 
and pretending the next release doesn't exist is onerous and 
counterproductive from our point of view.

So to the extent that GNU isn't willing to distribute our GPL releases 
if they don't conform to the guidelines, we feel we can't continue to 
maintain ghostscript as a GNU project, despite its significant 
historical place in the suite. Raph  promised to do a final GNU release 
that respected Richard's wishes as a gesture of good will, hence 
'farewell release.' It's politics, not licensing.

We remain committed to our policy of releasing previous versions under 
the GPL. We will likely change the name to 'GPL Ghostscript' for the 
next such release to indicate the lack of endorsement by the GNU 
project.

  -r