Re: Failure to detect pswrite and epswrite Ghostscript devices

On Sun, 1 Nov 2015, Test User wrote:
> 
> Are you saying that if I *did* build an application that depended on,
> for example, libGraphicsMagick-3.dll (with the Ghostscript library option
> enabled, whichit isnot in my case), I would have to distribute the source of
> my application because Ghostscript infected GraphicsMagick which in turn
> infected my application, and the way to avoid this would be to use GNU
> Ghostscript (downloaded from a GNU mirror site)?

Looking at older Artifex license statements (retrievable via the 
Wikipedia page on Ghostscript), it seems that even the GPL version 
(starting with some version) has a similar problem.

Artifex writes these license statements because it wants to sell 
commercial licenses for Ghostscript.

AGPL is designed to require providing source code even for binaries 
which are not distributed if they are accessed via a server.  It is 
intended to force web sites to give away software.

In my opinion (I am not a lawyer) there should not be an "infection" 
from GPL or AGPL if Ghostscript is run as a separate program rather 
than a library.  Note that the normal case under Windows (WIN32 build) 
is that GraphicsMagick accesses Ghostscript as a DLL located via the 
Windows registry so that Ghostscript becomes part of the "program" 
while it is loaded.  This is true for the MinGW build as well. 
However, tiny changes should allow use of Ghostscript as an external 
program since fallback code still exists.

The Cygwin build works differently in that Ghostscript is run the same 
(external program) as under Linux without the Ghostscript library 
configure option.

See the function InvokePostscriptDelegate() in magick/delegate.c.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
[email protected], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

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