Problems with Ghostscript license switched to AGPL?

[Adam Goode]

Hi,

I know this is old news, but Ghostscript switched to AGPL with version
9.07 (Feb 2013). I was not able to find any announcement of this on
the Fedora lists.

Fedora 18 was the last release with the non-AGPL Ghostscript.

This is a surprise, because since Fedora 19 we've possibly introduced
a fairly large end-user burden on AGPL compliance, with ghostscript
being rather deep in the dependency tree. Here are just a few of the
affected packages by way of "repoquery --whatrequires --recursive
ghostscript":

ImageMagick-0:6.8.6.3-4.fc20.x86_64
R-0:3.1.0-5.fc20.x86_64
cups-1:1.7.4-1.fc20.x86_64
ejabberd-0:2.1.13-7.fc20.x86_64
emacs-1:24.3-17.fc20.x86_64
erlang-0:R16B-03.7.fc20.x86_64
gimp-2:2.8.10-4.fc20.x86_64
graphviz-0:2.34.0-8.fc20.x86_64
libguestfs-1:1.26.5-1.fc20.x86_64
mediawiki-0:1.21.11-1.fc20.noarch
openstack-nova-0:2013.2.3-2.fc20.noarch
redhat-lsb-0:4.1-21.fc20.x86_64
vips-0:7.36.5-1.fc20.x86_64

Is seems like a problem that these packages depend on an AGPL package.
This list suggests to me that running a print server (cups) or XMPP
server (ejabberd) would put a burden on me to comply with AGPL. Am I
misunderstanding something?

My first reaction would be to fork ghostscript at a pre-AGPL version
at this point. Does this seem remotely feasible? Is there a better
option?


(Also, there is another AGPL package, libquvi, which notably has
nautilus and other packages as depending on it. But that's a separate
issue.)


Adam