On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 02:39:01AM -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote: > On Tue, 17 Feb 2004, David Dawes wrote: > > >Also check the LICENSE document > ><http://www.xfree86.org/~dawes/pre-4.4/LICENSE.html>. There is a lot > >of FUD being circulated about the licensing, so check here for the facts. > >Also check out the FSF's Free Software definition and their list of > >licenses, as well as the OSI's Open Source Definition. There are links > >to these sites from our LICENSE document. In particular, follow up with > >the BSD licences (original and revised), the FreeType License (FTL), > >the SGI Free Software License (which applies to GLX and CID), and the > >Apache 1.1 licence. > > > >Don't rely on the FUD being circulated by people who can barely hide > >their prejudice. Go straight to the definitive sources on licensing > >issues, namely the FSF and the OSI, and come to your own conclusions. > > So I must totally agree with you David. People should indeed > go to the definitive sources on open source licensing issues, the > FSF and the OSI. > > Interestingly enough, neither the XFree86 license version 1.0, > nor the new 1.1 license are listed as OSI approved open source > licenses: > > http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.php > > Going to the Free Software Foundations site to see their list of > approved free software licenses, the XFree86 license version 1.0 > and 1.1 are also noteably missing: > > http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html > > The FSF does have the following: > > "The X11 license. > This is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, > compatible with the GNU GPL. XFree86 uses the same license. This > is sometimes called the "MIT" license, but that term is > misleading since MIT has used many licenses for software." > > However that statement is inaccurate, as the parts of the > XFree86 source code which are copyright by XFree86.org, are > under either the XFree86 license version 1.0, or XFree86 license > version 1.1. > > The simple conclusion, is that XFree86 is not free software, as > defined by the Free Software Foundation nor open source software > as defined by the Open Source Initiative, however there are a few > inaccuracies present on both of these websites which need to be > fixed, in order to not mislead people into beleiving XFree86 is > MIT/X11 licensed.
I cannot agree with that. The new XFree86 licence is indeed free software, at least as far as Debian is concerned, or so Branden told me. The real problem here is not about the freeness of the licence, but about the GPL incompatibility of it, which is problematic for the client side libraries. There seems to be a tentative agreement to not change the licence on these client side libraries, but only on the server code, which should make any arguments here mostly moot. David, any advancement on this ? Friendly, Sven Luther _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
