Re: XFree86 4.4.0 licensing issues
Re: XFree86 4.4.0 licensing issues
- Subject: Re: XFree86 4.4.0 licensing issues
- From: "Torrey T. Lyons" <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 16:27:25 -0800
At 9:55 AM -0600 2/18/04, Dave Schroeder wrote:
As some of you may be aware, there have been some changes to the
license for Xfree86 4.4.0 that make it incompatible with the GPL.
For this reason, Mandrake, Gentoo, Red Hat, Debian, OpenBSD, and
others have all announced they will not be shipping XFree86 4.4
under its current license.
I am not in favor of the license change and have written about my
objections on email@hidden where the license is being discussed.
However, the discussion surrounding it has revealed that there have
always been parts of the XFree86 tree which have licenses that were
incompatible with the GPL. GPL incompatible code in the X server is
not a practical problem anyway, although it may be a political one.
GPL incompatible code in the X libraries is a real issue and in
response to this XFree86's new license is not being used in any of
the X libraries.
I would like to strongly encourage Apple and any other Darwin/Mac OS
X XFree86 developers to please NOT commit any changes to XFree86
4.4.0 since the time the questionable license changes have gone into
effect, and until such time that the situation is resolved.
Currently XFree86 is the only project that is anywhere close to
having a release ready product. Holding off support for Mac OS X in
XFree86 4.4.0 will likely have no positive impact and will deprive
users of its improvements for many months. On the other hand, well
reasoned arguments to the XFree86 Forum may be useful in effecting
change.
In any case, the new XFree86 license applies only to code copyrighted
by the XFree86 Project. All of the Mac OS X specific code is
copyrighted by individual XonX contributors or Apple and bears the
old-style XFree86 license. Any improvements made to Mac OS X support
in the XFree86 tree can be used elsewhere under the original license.
So even if the new license stays as is, XFree86 4.4.0 will be useful.
The libraries will be as GPL compatible as they always were and the
"advertising clause" is not particularly difficult to satisfy by Mac
OS X packagers at the present time. (I feel it sets a bad precedent,
but see the forum list for more discussion.)
Note that I am making this request not because I really care about
the license personally, but if XFree86 is marginalized because of so
many *nix distributions' rejection of Xfree86 4.4 because of
licensing terms, Apple/Darwin continuing to use/support it will
likely hurt us in the long run. I would ask that Apple and
Darwin/Mac OS X XFree86 developers please join the ranks of other
major distributions in holding off putting any more support behind
Xfree86 4.4 until the licensing situation is sorted out.
The current climate of infighting in X11 development is unfortunate.
Your concerns about X11 support on Mac OS X continuing to track the
prevailing standard in the *nix world are valid. This is something
that we will have to continue to watch.
--Torrey
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