Hi David ! > On looking through the fbdev drivers in the Linux kernel source, I see > very few cases where license notices from XFree86 driver source are > included. This means that either the license for these drivers has no > impact on the work you are talking about (making what you have written > above moot), or some authors of portions of the current Linux fbdev code > have violated the terms of the existing licenses by not including a > verbatim copy of the copyright, license notice, and disclaimer text in > relevant source code. > > I would also like to echo Egbert's comments about the one-way nature of > your concerns.
I'm mostly concerned at this point about radeonfb and rivafb. The radeonfb in the current mainstream kernel was written by Ani Joshi who also wrote the first radeon driver in XFree. So there wasn't any liencing issue at this point. However, I rewrote the kernel driver almost completely using a lot of informations from the XFree one as ATI is maintaining it actively. My rewritten radeonfb driver _do_ contain a copy of the licence included in the XFree one along with the (c) assignement. This new version will make its way in linux mainstream soon (has been in the "powermac" tree for a while now). The other one is rivafb, for which we use a file almost verbatim from the XFree one, which is riva_hw.c and is provided by nvidia. Also in this case (at least the last time I worked on this driver), the original licence of the file was intact. I can't speak for other drivers ... (well, I can speak for other kernel drivers that are unrelated to XFree, but that's not a problem :) The fact that it is mostly a one way is mostly due to the fact that the main problem here is seeking for HW informations. Card vendors put that information into XFree via drivers, we rely on this for the kernel drivers. However, at least as far as _I_ am concerned, I've always provided back fixes whenever I found something not working properly or possible improvements to the XFree driver, like getting DRI working properly on PowerMacs with the help of Michel Danzer. Regards, Ben. _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
