On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 08:37:28AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 11:50:40AM +1100, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> > On Fri, 2004-01-30 at 03:58, David Dawes wrote:
> > > Announcement: Modification to the base XFree86(TM) license.
> > >
> > > After a thorough re-examination of the XFree86(TM) license and reviewing
> > > how it fits in with the Project's long-stated licensing philosophy ("You
> > > can do what you like with the code except claim that you wrote it."),
> > > The XFree86 Project, Inc. has made some changes to its base license.
> > > This license review was prompted by a desire to ensure that XFree86 and
> > > its contributors are receiving due credit for their work. The text of
> > > the modified license can be found at
> > > <http://www.xfree86.org/legal/licenses.html>.
> > >
> > > .../...
> >
> > Hi David !
> >
> > I'm no license/legal expert, but do that mean the licence becomes GPL
> > incompatible ? In that case, that basically means you are screwing up
> > any effort to make a decent graphics driver model in the linux kernel.
>
> Benjamin:
>
> Notice that this only applies to code marked as copyrighted by the
> XFree86 project, and supposedly, the actual driver code is mostly
> copyrighted by their respective authors, i doubt the graphic card
> companies would want to give away the copyright on the code they
> write, and i know the driver i wrote has myself as copyright.
>
> As thus, i doubt this will have any influence in your particular case.
>
> As for the GPL incompatibility, It would need proper checking, but i
> think David believes there is no problem, altough many people claim the
> contrary (Saying that the even Apache recently changed their licence
> because of this incompatibility).
>
> That said, this would really be a problem only for the libraries, so
> maybe it would be best to have a more lenient licence for the libraries
> (how much of them are copyrighted by the XFree86 project anyway, most
> should be comming from X.org, no ?), while keeping this licence for the
> X server propper, and whatever the actual authors chose for the drivers,
> or probably the old licence.
I second this. As for the libs and the GPL incompability issue the
following files seems to be affected by the new license (extracted
from the diff David posted before):
Index: include/Xdefs.h
Index: include/extensions/xf86misc.h
Index: include/extensions/xf86mscstr.h
Index: include/fonts/fontproto.h
Index: lib/GLw/Imakefile
Index: lib/GLw/GLwXm/PrimitiveP.h
Index: lib/GLw/GLwXm/Xm.h
Index: lib/GLw/GLwXm/XmP.h
Index: lib/GLw/GLwXm/XmStrDefs.h
Index: lib/XRes/XRes.man
Index: lib/Xfontcache/Xfontcache.man
Index: lib/Xp/XpExtUtil.h
Index: lib/Xss/Xss.man
Index: lib/Xxf86misc/XF86Misc.c
I'm not sure if manual pages are a problem here, but I'm quite sure
that include files and the Misc extension implementation are. :-(
I don't think that the XFree86 Project Inc. is interested into Linux
distributors shipping 4.4.0 RC2 (CVS release) instead of 4.4.0 with
their next release because of this GPL incompability problem with
XFree86 libs.
Best regards,
Stefan
Public Key available
----------------------------------------------------
Stefan Dirsch (Res. & Dev.) SUSE LINUX AG
Tel: 0911-740 53 0 Maxfeldstrasse 5
FAX: 0911-741 77 55 D-90409 Nürnberg
http://www.suse.de Germany
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