Sven, I have been forwarding industry-significant mssages from the Forum list to the xorg_foundation list because i knew that many xorg list recipients were not monitoring the Forum list.
David Dawes is aware of this. I have also informed rms. Leon On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 14:42:57 +0100 Sven Luther wrote: >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [email protected], [email protected] >Subject: Re: FWD from XFree86 forum: GPL-incompatible license > >On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 05:00:25PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: >> On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 01:10:04PM -0500, Leon Shiman wrote: >> > ------------- Begin Forwarded Message ------------- >> > From: David Dawes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> > To: Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> > Subject: Re: [forum] GPL-incompatible license >> [...] >> > Basically, XFree86 licensing policy has always been to allow licences >> > that satisfy both of these extremely important requirements: >> > >> > 1. Be an Open Source licence. >> > 2. Not require that source code be made available for binary-only >> > distributions of derivative works. >> > >> > The general preference has been for licences like the BSD and MIT >> > licences. By BSD, I mean the original BSD licence in common use when >> > XFree86 began. Historically, GPL compatibility has not been an issue >> > one way or the other regarding XFree86's licensing policy and so to make >> > it an issue now would represent a very real change in our licensing >> > policy. >> >> For the Debian Project, I recently did some investigation of the claim >> that the 4-clause BSD license, which I think is what David is referring >> to (since the Regents dropped the advertising clause in 1998, and I >> XFree86 was founded years prior), is preferentially used in the XFree86 >> code base. >> >> That license is indeed used, but an MIT-style copyright is used on more >> code in XFree86 copyrighted by the Regents than the 4-clause BSD license >> is, despite the latter being the representation of the Regents' >> copyright license in XFree86's LICENSE file. >> >> The messy truth is that there is code copyrighted by the Regents in >> XFree86 under *several* similar but distinct licenses. Some with an >> advertising clause, some without. Some GPL-compatible, some not. >> >> My findings follow. Please feel free to ignore the references to >> DFSG-freeness, which is a concern primarily for the Debian project, and >> my footnote discussion of unpacking a Debian source package. >> >> If this next part bores you, skip to the end for my conclusions. > >Branden, > >Again, you do great job in following the licence stuff, and >felicitations to you and to the rest of the X strike force for the soon >to be upcoming 4.3.0-1 package. > >I have an interogation about the aim of this mail though. You are >clearly following up on a mail from [EMAIL PROTECTED], but in this >response you don't CC them. Is this willed from your part, as a way to >discuss this issue without XFree86 and then inform them about this ? Or >maybe it was only a mistake from your part and you forgot them in your >CC list ? Or maybe some other reason ? Could you please clarify your >position on this point, and eventually forward this list to the >[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list too ? > >Friendly, > >Sven Luther >
