On Friday 14 March 2003 08:03 pm, Ian Lance Taylor wrote: > Obviously you are correct that nobody took away the original free > code. But this is an example of a proprietary fork in which > end-users suffered. They could not incorporate improvements to the > free X Window system code on their own systems, because they were not > able to build their own servers. I was one of those people myself, > so it's not purely abstract.
I forgot about that one. You'll have to forgive my shaky memory, because the obvious success of the free versions tends to eclipse the others. I think that OpenWindows and MetroX are the only others still in the running. OpenWindows is platform specific and MetroX seems to be relegated to specialty niches. (The Windows based X servers are a different category IMO). What caused the previous preponderance of incompatible proprietary X implementations? I would point the finger not at the license but at the Open Group, who could never make up their mind if they wanted the code to be free or not. It seems to me that they actually encouraged proprietary forks. But one thing that didn't happen was a fork of the standard itself. You can read about those that tried it in the history books. In this the MIT (not BSD) license was successful. -- David Johnson ___________________ http://www.usermode.org -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
