Re: License issues

[Ryan Underwood <nemesis-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 06:37:52PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> 
> But unknowingly so. We were lead to believe that the advertizing clause
> had been droped from that part of the code which was covered by the BSD
> licence.

By whom?

> > It doesn't matter if they haven't committed to not change the license in
> > the future.  We can argue theoretical cases all day long (What if
> > XFree86 was bought by MICROSOFT??!?!?) but what good does this really do
> > anyone?  Right now, the xlibs issue is moot, as it has always been.
> > When the evil David Dawes and his cronies concoct some plan to take over
> > the world and change the xlibs license to something GPL-incompatible
> > later, that would be the time to be concerned about it.  By that time,
> > maybe the GPL is revised, or dynamic linking has precedent in court to
> > not cause a work to be a derived work.  Who knows?
> 
> What are you speaking like that to me ? I am taking enough heat already
> from trying to defend the new licence in the outside world without
> needing to get such BS from you.

WTF?  I think you are taking personal offense way too easily, but that's
just my opinion.

> I do believe and have always believed that the new licence is a mistake,
> and that it should not have made, but it is a licence that is in the
> hands of the XFree86 project to make, thus quickening their path to
> obsolescence probably, but still it is their (your ?) decision, and they
> are free to make it.

No, it is not my decision.  But it's not going to halt any contributions
that I make, because I think it's not a big a problem as Slashdot types
have been making of it.  Certainly, there are some issues, but I think
this is a special case.  This is XFree86, one of the largest, oldest,
most consistently active distributed development codebases in the
history of software engineering, not Joe's Random Weblog App or Foo
Mixer 0.1.  Furthermore, the "problem" is not that it's non-free, it's
just that 
1) it isn't free enough to get along with the GPL, even though exception
was made for client side libraries
2) It requires distributors to credit the project, which is an
inconvenience.

Put in perspective of the amount of work that has gone into the XFree86
codebase and continues to go into it, it doesn't seem too much of an
issue.  But you are free to work on and recommend whatever you want to
other people.

> But claiming that when i contributed code the whole of XFree86 was so
> licence encoumbered is a lie, or at least it was not openly known and
> openly told to would-be contributors.

Your code is not license encumbered unless the copyright was assigned to
the XFree86 project.  If you retain the copyright, then you are free to
relicense it to others on whatever terms you wish.  If you didn't retain
the copyright....

> > 3) The new license does not apply to client-side libraries, only the X
> > server.
> 
> So, why are you screaming on me ? Is this not all i have ever said, and
> was i not on the side of the XFree86 project on this issue ?

Who is screaming?  I thought we were having a civil discussion and
disagreeing about it.  Is that not possible?

> Seriously i don't understand this whole issue anymore.

I think we understand it, and are on different sides.  There is nothing
wrong with that.

-- 
Ryan Underwood, <nemesis@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

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