Re: License issues

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Mar 05, 2004 at 02:43:35PM -0600, Ryan Underwood wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Mar 05, 2004 at 06:20:13AM +0100, Dominique Boin wrote:
> > 
> > Does the benefit of changing the license, supercede the disadvantages of 
> > exclusion of 4.4.0 in several major Linux and BSD UNIX distributors?
> 
> There was nothing changed.  It was a clarification of existing policy.

Sorry, but this is simply not true. 

> > If yes, what will happen now? Many distributors refuse to incorporate 
> > non GPL-compatible code into their releases.
> 
> This approach is not rational.  I don't know of any distributor that
> does this either.  The main issue was that if the license applied to the
> xlib, then the distributors would be violating the license on GPL
> software linked to xlib.  There are two problems with this:
> 1) xlib is not covered by the new license
> 2) The question of whether software licenses cross dynamic linking
> boundaries is still an open one, and not a good issue to jump to
> conclusions on.

The concerns are about xlibs and the other client side libraries. As i
understand, apart from the licence faq mention, XFree86 has not made a
definitive commitment to not change this in the future, and this creates
some concern. This may be comming after a future meating of the XFree86
deciding comitee or whatever though.

Also, to a lesser degree, there is the problem of the SDK and GPL covered
drivers, altough this may be a political decision not to allow GPLed
covered code based on the SDK. This would be understandable, i think,
since GPLed drivers would not be reusable by the XFree86 project, but
that was not what was said in the response to my query about this.

> The people who are excluding XFree86 on license terms are simply being
> zealots and resistant to a perceived "change", when in fact there has

Yeah, i think you are living outside of reality, please open your eyes.

> been none.  Personally, I consider advertising clauses to be obnoxious,
> but the alternative is to contact every contributor from the past and
> ask them to relicense their code.  Is that more practical or less
> practical than simply tying together a consistent license for the entire
> X server?

Please explain clearly what the problem is.

> > While this is of course not exactly true since not all will abandon
> > 4.4.0, this possible scenario truely raises the question whether this
> > license change is worth all the things XFree86 will loose by it. Is it
> > really that important?
> 
> No, it's not that important, especially since nothing has changed
> besides applying a consistent license to the whole of the X server which
> reflects the licenses that have been allowed on individual contributions
> since time began.

This is clearly not true, and was not what i was lead to believe when i
contributed to the XFree86 codebase. Not that my contributions are many,
but still.

Friendly,

Sven Luther
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