News / Press

Ghostscript 10.01.0: Disabling Silent Install Option

By Artifex - Thursday, April 27, 2023

For years, our GPL Ghostscript distribution has included a silent installer option for system administrators to deploy the software across multiple machines without notifying end users about the installation or the GNU AGPL license. However, in Ghostscript 10.01.0, we have reluctantly decided to disable this feature. 

We have received some pushback from this decision. We hear your concerns, we understand them, and we sympathise with the issues this has caused you.

Nonetheless, faced with undeniable evidence that this option has been abused, the company has made the decision that we are no longer prepared to ship a GNU AGPL licensed binary with this option enabled by default. We have received numerous concerning reports from users who were unaware that Ghostscript was installed on their systems, often running outdated and vulnerable releases. We will not open ourselves up to accusations of being complicit in such 'bad actions'.

Ghostscript is, of course, open source, and it is a trivial thing to rebuild with the option enabled. Users are more than welcome to do that for themselves.

Once again, we apologise for any inconvenience, but would ask you to understand and respect our position. This decision aims to mitigate the security and corporate compliance issues associated with outdated and unknown installations. Further discussion on this subject will not change anything, and merely distracts the developers from their actual work.