Copyright (C) 1993 Aladdin Enterprises. All rights reserved.

Permission to copy and distribute this document unmodified for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.


This document provides additional clarification on the issue of when Ghostscript can be distributed with a commercial product. It is included in the Ghostscript fileset under the name commprod.doc.

For an overview of Ghostscript and a list of the documentation files, see the README file in the Ghostscript fileset.

The Use of "Free" Ghostscript With Commercial Products
A number of companies distribute Ghostscript, which is a copyrighted work, with their commercial products, without entering into any prior explicit agreement with Aladdin Enterprises, which is the holder of the copyright in Ghostscript. Ghostscript is distributed freely with a license, called the GNU General Public License (also known as the "GNU License", the "GPL", or the "copyleft"), which permits Ghostscript to be distributed with commercial products under certain circumstances. The purpose of this document is to explain those circumstances in detail. Note that we consider this entire document a clarification of the GPL: we believe that anyone distributing Ghostscript with the GPL with a commercial product must follow the criteria presented here, whether or not they have received this document.

For those unfamiliar with the GPL, we now summarize its key provisions. This is not a complete statement of the GPL; the full GPL is included under the name COPYING in the fileset that comprises Ghostscript, and can also be obtained from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), 675 Mass Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139 (U.S.A.). In case of doubt or conflict, the contents of the COPYING file or the document obtained from the FSF, not this summary, are authoritative.

Provision #1 makes it much harder to have a commercial business based only on selling copies of Ghostscript (as distributed with the GPL) or products that contain Ghostscript, since any customer is free to make as many copies as they want for any purpose. (Businesses based on added value, such as added documentation or services, subscription to updates, or just ease of access to the software, may still be feasible.) Provision #2 effectively prevents the development of proprietary commercial products that incorporate Ghostscript as a part, since these are "derived works" in the legal sense. It is provision #3 that allow companies like Autodesk to distribute Ghostscript with their commercial products.

It should be noted that these companies are still required to obey #1 and #2 with respect to Ghostscript itself; in particular, if they modified or augmented Ghostscript in any way, they must supply (or offer to supply) to customers the source code for their modifications or additions, and in any case must supply the GPL as part of Ghostscript.

Questions have arisen at times as to whether Ghostscript is only "aggregated" with other parts of a commercial product, or whether the product has become a "derived work." In the past, Aladdin Enterprises has been relatively lenient about allowing companies to package Ghostscript with their commercial products, as long as Ghostscript was in the form of a separate executable that might be called through a mechanism like `exec'. However, we have learned that a number of companies have been distributing Ghostscript with their products in a way that does not make it absolutely clear and obvious to users that Ghostscript is in fact a separate program, governed by a different license and authored by someone other than the distributor. For that reason, we now wish to state the criteria that we use for determining whether Ghostscript is being "aggregated" with another program.

We consider Ghostscript to be "aggregated" with another piece of software, which we will refer to as "the application", only if all of the following conditions are met:

Regarding this last point, the GPL clearly intends that if the distributor only offers to provide the Ghostscript source code (as opposed to actually distributing the source code with every copy of the application), then they must deliver the source code in a timely way to anyone requesting it.
For example, if the distributor offers a refund if the product is returned within a certain amount of time, the distributor must be prepared to deliver the source code well within that period if the customer orders it very soon after receiving the product.

Here are some examples of situations which do NOT qualify as "aggregation".