Rainer Orth wrote:
> Alan Coopersmith writes:
>> Rainer Orth wrote:
>>> Alan Coopersmith <Alan.Coopersmith at Sun.COM> writes:
>>>
>>>> I never said you were not allowed to run it. Sun is not allowed to make
>>>> the current Xsun server available as a freely redistributable download,
>>>> which is what's required for inclusion in OpenSolaris or the OpenSolaris
>>>> IPS repository. The exact contract terms are confidential.
>>> But such packages could go into the extra repository instead, right?
>> Unfortunately, I don't believe the contract allows that either.
>
> Strange: you are allowed to provide SX:CE iso images with that stuff for
> registered downloads, but registered download from the extra repository is
> forbidden? Lawyers ;-(
Unfortunately, contracts signed in the 1990's did not foresee the future of
internet enabled package repositories or that we might someday want to
distribute Xsun as a separate package instead of a core part of the OS.
If I had reason to believe someone was actually interested in doing the work,
I could release most of the sources to the Xsun binary itself - possibly even
all of them (I haven't checked yet) - to make it usable, someone would have to
port them to work with the current libXfont (which in the Xsun builds is called
libfont.so, but that's trivial to fix). That also only covers the core server
- I could even throw in the cg6 driver source, since that's already published
as the Xsun reference driver source - all the other drivers would still be the
closed binary blobs you have today. The biggest differences between that and
the Sun-shipped Xsun would be change of the TrueType & Postscript font renderers
from the encumbered versions to the FreeType code that Xorg uses, and the lack
of the Display Postscript extension.
Sun wouldn't support it or ship it in our repos, but I don't see why a
dis-encumbered version couldn't go into /contrib, though porting to a spec
file for source juicer could be fun.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
