If you interactively start ghostscript, you see this: $ gs GPL Ghostscript 9.26 (2018-11-20) Copyright (C) 2018 Artifex Software, Inc. All rights reserved. This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details. GS> From this, the reader gets the impression that ghostscript is licensed under the GPL, since it calls itself "GPL Ghostscript". Only when you carefully read the LICENSE file inside the distribution tarball, where it is still consistently and several times called "GPL Ghostscript", it turns out (near the end) that the license is actually the "GNU Affero General Public License". One might call this deceptive and disingenuous on the part of Affero, really... I noticed it only after careful examination of the LICENSE file. One could even argue that this output does not fulfill the GAGPL's requirement about displaying "Appropriate Legal Notices". In particular, it steers the reader actively away from "that licensees may convey the work under this License, and how to view a copy of this License" (by steering the reader towards the wrong license). "All rights reserved" seems to me also contradicting the GAGPL. Please make this text more clear.
ping... 16 s/Affero/Artifex/ (this seems to be an indication of confusion to me) Additional: There also is no file named PUBLIC.
(In reply to Rhialto from comment #5) > ping... > > 16 s/Affero/Artifex/ (this seems to be an indication of confusion to me) No, the company that owns the copyright to Ghostscript is called Artifex Software Inc (www.artifex.com), the license is the Affero General Public License, as originally defined by the Affero project (www.affero.org) but note that we are using version 3 of that license, sometimes referred to as the Gnu Affero General Public License v3. If you think we have confused the two somewhere, then please point out where, exactly we've referenced the wrong organisation. > Additional: There also is no file named PUBLIC. Apologies I'm afraid we ommitted to update the status of this report. Please see the folloing commits: Fix greeting and include COPYING http://git.ghostscript.com/?p=ghostpdl.git;a=commit;h=0371b3cef0e28fa603437faf983c7be8f2160214 Reword the greeting: http://git.ghostscript.com/?p=ghostpdl.git;a=commit;h=db96dc02a83e45d2997315e52e77cb4c283c09ce Tweak PCL/LICENSE: http://git.ghostscript.com/?p=ghostpdl.git;a=commit;h=519326a98c1d2172da280305fef0a3a52ddc65bc Add CUPS license: http://git.ghostscript.com/?p=ghostpdl.git;a=commit;h=a21912a4c7c2a0cbc79c1a86df77b63bcae850fb We believe this adequately removes any confusion regarding the License under which Ghostscript and the GhostPDL family is supplied, as well as addressing a couple of areas of, essentially, bitrot due to changes in our build system. These commits were included in the current release of the Ghostpdl family, 9.27, and if you install that version you should see the changes. Although I believe this bug should be resolved as 'fixed' I'm leaving it open temporarily in case the owner wanted to do some more work on this.