Re: X11 fork available

On Mon, 15 Apr 2002, Roland wrote:

> At 01:34 PM 4/13/02 +0200, Ove Kaaven wrote:
> >wine-patches and apply it to the X11 tree whenever possible. This will
> >make your contributions more widely used, so we encourage as many as
> >possible to do so. And if it's out of the question for you, then we
> 
> Just one question. If a contribution is already based on some previous 
> LGPL-only licensed contribution it may not be licensed under X11. I hope 
> this is clear. Otherwise it might happen that in a few months we suddenly 
> discover that a big amount of our work was based on some LGPL software.

It's easy enough to detect that a patch was written on top of LGPL-ed code
when it fails to apply to the X11 tree (ReWind). Then it won't be applied
(or put on indefinite hold if there's a chance that the work it's based on
could be relicensed under the X11).

> On the other hand I don't know how strict this is. For example if some 
> contributor makes an LGPL small bugfix to a code fragment. And then another 
> guy takes that bug-fixed code, improves it, and wants to license it under 
> the X11, is that possible?

If we want to apply that improvement to the X11 tree, then the patch must
be applied directly without the LGPL-ed patch (e.g. with manual patching).
It does not mean that we'd have to live without the bugfix though, only
that someone would have to reimplement the bugfix (which shouldn't be that
hard since we'd know the problem, and copyright does not protect ideas).