On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 07:19:38AM -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote: > On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Daniel Stone wrote: > >On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 02:04:00AM -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote: > >> It's GPL licensed unfortunately. Only MIT licensed code is > >> accepted into XFree86, so this driver will never be included. > >> That means once kernel 2.6 is standard, the majority of laptop > >> users with synaptics touchpads will have to rely on their OS > >> distribution to provide the GPL driver, or will have to compile > >> it themselves. > >> > >> The only other option would be for someone to write a brand new > >> driver for synaptics and license it as MIT, without looking at > >> the GPL driver's source code. It's possible to do a clean room > >> implementation, but I'm not sure if anyone would really want to > >> bother when there's a working driver already. > > > >Well, couldn't the upstream author just relicense it? > > That depends on wether or not the code is original code, or if it > is a derivative of any other GPL sources. It's possible > theoretically, but dependant on the history of the code, and also > the author(s) wishes.
That was kind of implicit. -- Daniel Stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.debian.org - http://www.kde.org - http://www.freedesktop.org "Configurability is always the best choice when it's pretty simple to implement" -- Havoc Pennington, gnome-list
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