Re: [Fresco-devel] Re: Cross-platformability

On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 12:16:57PM -0700, M. Evans wrote:
[snip]
> You do have a point that lower-level libraries such as Xlib are less
> worrisome as LGPL code, because they are less likely to require
> modification.  That's a point which I bring up regularly
> when decisions are made whether to adopt LGPL code.  As a user
> interface system, I don't think Fresco falls into that category.
> (Something like GGI or SDL or Xlib does though.)
[snip]

I'm not going to reply to the rest of this thread; rather get actual
work done than argue about licensing :-) But I think you're confused
about what Fresco is.  Fresco is analogous to the Windows GUI, or to
X, and nobody includes modified X servers or alternate versions of
Windows with their programs.  Xlib is much less lower-level than our
client libraries, in the sense that there are reasons a client might
want to change xlib to work differently (indeed, there are alternate
libraries designed to speak the X protocol, while fixing problems with
xlib).  We, on the other hand, just have IDL, which specifies nothing
more than the protocol itself.  So you're much _more_ likely to want
to change xlib than our stuff.  And yet, I've never encountered a
program that had to include its own version of xlib, just because they
needed some hacks the real version didn't support...

Hopefully that clears up some technical issues.

-- Nathaniel

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