What will be new in FC3 ?
James Wilkinson
james at westexe.demon.co.uk
Mon Oct 18 12:23:58 UTC 2004
Gene Heskett wrote:
> That blame is miss-placed. Trouble had been brewing at XFree for
> quite a while, and the license change was the straw that effectively
> broke the camels back. The new XFree license is, AIUI, incompatible
> with the GPL. And anything thats not compatible with the GPL or the
> LGPL, isn't welcome in any distro unless they have sufficient legal
> staff to defend themselves from any potential copyright problems.
> That sort of thing is an exposure no one needs. Only M$ can afford
> to take that chance since they have rather large reserves.
I mostly want to agree with you, here. It wasn't the license change
itself that was the big problem: the only parts of XFree86 affected were
the "other side" of the highly documented X network interface, on the X
server (= what talks to the hardware) side. And there isn't any GPL code
anywhere near that, as I understand it: it wouldn't be acceptable to the
BSDs.
The big problem, as I see it, is that the license change was imposed
without discussion, without any assurance that it wouldn't be applied on
the client side (which *does* have to work with GPL code), the storms of
protest were ignored, and that this seemed typical of the project:
XFree86 was delaring that it could and would impose such changes.
This is where the problem lies, and where the MySQL problem lay: what
isn't welcome is maintainers that act without consideration of what
their actions will do to the rest of the community, and aren't prepared
to sometimes accept that they're wrong.
A legal or code *!#$ you, if you will. And programmers can work around
code.
Now, a stand-alone project (or one that doesn't need to *link* against
GPL code) using a GPL-incompatible (but Free Software) license is
acceptable. For example, older releases of Vim or Apache had non-GPL
compatible licenses
(http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses).
James.
--
E-mail address: james | Whenever [Richard I] returned to England he always
@westexe.demon.co.uk | set out again immediately for the Mediterranean and
| was therefore known as Richard Gare de Lyon.
| -- '1066 and All That'
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