AFPL Ghostscript and GPL Ghostscript

AFPL Ghostscript and GPL Ghostscript

Good day to you!

Thank you for your question about Ghostscript. The main difference between AFPL and GPL Ghostscript is in their licensing. Otherwise both are a suite of software for the display or printing of document pages, and the conversion between PostScript and PDF files.

AFPL Ghostscript is distributed under the license named ‘Aladdin Ghostscript Free Public License’. This license gives permission to the end users to freely use copy and distribute AFPL Ghostscript but does not permit commercial distribution. The former name of AFPL Ghostscript was Aladdin Ghostscript.

GPL Ghostscript is distributed under the license named ‘GNU General Public License’. This license gives permission freely use, copy and redistribute under some specified condition (including commercial distribution) The GPL versions of Ghostscripts are usually released after the next version of AFPL Ghostscript

Hope this answers your questions

AFPL Ghostscript and GPL Ghostscript

Ghostscript is an interpreter used for PDF files or Portable Document Format and PostScript files. Ghostscript has been under continuous development for more than 20 years and has been adapted to many systems. It is available both for commercial licensing from Artifex and under GNU GPL Affero license. This interpreter is composed of a graphics library and a PostScript interpreter layer.

If you want to download binaries for Ghostscript for different systems, you can get them from Ghostscript, GhostPCL Downloads Page. The source code for Ghostscript is included in Ghostscript and GhostPDL downloads. It was L. Peter Deutsch who originally wrote Ghostscript for the GNU Project in 1986. It was released under the GNU General Public License.

Deutsch later formed Aladdin Enterprises and use it to license Ghostscript under a proprietary license. Currently, Ghostscript is owned by Artifex Software and maintained by its employees and the worldwide user community.