On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 04:19:31PM +0100, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote: >DD> [XFree86] was not, as a whole, FSF-free before the change, let >DD> alone GPL-compatible. Same after the change. But then XFree86 >DD> has never factored in those two licensing criteria. > >That's not quite the point, David. > >Of the many reasons for which I was happy to contribute my work to >XFree86 was that the old licence guaranteed that anyone could use my >code. It was okay for Debian or FreeBSD to grab a routine that I >wrote, as it was for Apple or Microsoft.
They still can use your code, because *you* choose the licence for your code. Nothing has changed there. >Unless I've missed a post, you still haven't explained what it is that >you're trying to achieve with the new licence. I would like to hear >you justify that the advantages of the new licence justify what I >perceive as a net loss in code availability. Equivalence of attribution, as I've stated many times. If this was an irrelevant issue, there would have been no fuss over the licence. So, it obviously isn't irrelevant. This is why XFree86 licensing is now being evaluated against metrics that weren't used before. The licensing of XFree86 as a whole, even the libraries as a whole, didn't meet the GPL-compatibility or even FSF-free metrics before the change. Why? Those metrics were never used to evaluate licence suitability for code included in XFree86. To meet those metrics now, code would have to be removed or rewritten. If these metrics are as critical as some claim, then it is probably a good thing that these broader problems have been exposed. David _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
