!Printers and !Printers+

What is the situation with merging and submiting the two !Printers sources ? The !Printers+ licence would not be compatible with the Castle licence would it ? If it is ok to do this, I have a merged version that needs testing. Everything seems to work, but I don’t have access to a compatible USB printer. A printer I do have goes through the setup procedure but only as a text printer, but does not work ! (it doesn’t work with the castle !Printers either). I have only merged the two, not made any functional changes (yet!!).

Tank

From my reading of the Printers+ licence (mozilla public licence v1.1) you can’t release your code as the Printers+ licence requires every one who distributed it (including you and castle) to release all the source code and the castle licence says that castle has to be able to release the code without the source so the two licences are incompatible.

That was my reading. The only point may be who owns the changes, as Castle own “the whole of RISC OS”.

Are the changes made by RISCOS LTD ment to be fed back to Castle ?

At the time !Printers+ source was put on SourceForge, there was a lot of discussion about the legitimacy of RISCOS LTD releasing the code.

It would seem a shame that the two forks could not be merged, as they both offer improvements. Castles version with USB support, the ability to clone a printer and install a printer from the Resources folder, and RISCOS LTD vesion with extra connection options and feed, bins and paper extras.

This isn’t a loaded question, but what are the improvements in Printers+? For some reason, I’m having trouble accessing it on the SourceForge site.

Tank: Unfortunately it doesn’t matter who owns the originally released Printers+ source they can only change the licence for that code they can’t change the licence for code that was contributed by third parties to the sourceforge project under the Mozilla licence as those parts are copyright the third party and for them to licence.

Steve

The main improvements are the ability to add more source tray and output bin options.

The original printers only alowed Manual or Auto trays. The newer version ment any amount of trays could be added.The same for output bins.If you wish I can send you a copy of the original zip file of the sources.

Colin

There is no mention of the addition of trays and bins in the changes log, all of which were made by Dave Marsden (as you may know is no longer with us). Hence my original question about the ownership of the original !Printers

Just a thought, is there any chance Castle would allow the !Printers frontend to be released under the same licence as !Printers+.

I’m assuming from the lack of a reply that this is not possible.

It’s a good idea and we’ll have to see what Castle think. I wouldn’t expect this sort of thing to move very quickly though.

Sorry to dig up an old thread, but after reading a newsgroup post it reminded me about this.

I believe no work has been done on the ROOL version in the CVS repository.

Cheers

I think it may end up being quicker and easier trying to solve this by technical than by legal means. !Printers+ is a special case where licensing is concerned, and although I’m unfamiliar with its code, I have a hard time imagining that the changes over !Printers are really all that substantial in the grand scheme of things.

The licensing of the code can be split into three categories:

1) Code supplied by Castle (including any modifications fed back from ROL if there are any), which is only legitimately available to us under the Castle licence.

2) Modifications by ROL which were not fed back to to Castle. These are disputed by Castle and ROL. However, to the extent that they can be adapted to satisfy the requirements of the two licenses – (from MPL’s point of view) that they be in separate source files from Castle-licenced code, and (from the Castle licence point of view) that the sources “can reasonably be considered an independent and separate work” – then some redistribution may be possible. It is debatable what constitutes “an independent and separate work”, but I think we might get away with a BASIC library, providing it uses a well-defined API and few if any global variables – just good engineering practice, really. ROL could not object under the terms of the MPL, and Castle would IMHO be unlikely to object, especially since it would not affect their ability to make commercial releases (it’s very easy to comply with the MPL’s source redistribution terms, they don’t even need to do it themselves and could simply refer to the ROOL source repository).

3) Modifications made by SourceForge contributors. What I’d recommend here is contacting these people and seeing whether they would be willing to dual-licence their contributions under the MPL and Castle licences. If so, then their contributions can be lumped in with categories (1) or (2) above, as is most convenient – otherwise they have to be treated like category (2).

So, that presents a way forward for sizeable lumps of new functionality. However, smaller modifications (e.g. bugfixes) are unlikely to be splittable in that way. However, these are relatively easy to merge across by clean-room methods – someone like Tank can write up a detailed description of the bug being fixed, so someone else can fix that bug again in the Castle-licenced version.

As someone who has looked at both sets of sources, Tank is probably best placed to evaluate the relative amounts of changes that fall into the two categories.