Re: [forum] Re: Announcement: Modification to the base XFree86(TM) license.

On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 05:19:03PM +0100, Egbert Eich wrote:
> Benjamin Herrenschmidt writes:
> 
>  > Losing the ability of porting code straight from these to the fbdev
>  > drivers will basically kill all my efforts to turn the kernel radeonfb
>  > into a decent driver as I need to be able to re-use the code ATI puts
>  > in the XFree version. I suppose the same will happen to linux rivafb.
> 
> Relating to that: exchanging code between XFree86 and kernel has been a
> one-way road so far. The GPL the kernel is under doesn't allow us to
> port back improvements that have been made to the kernel to our drivers
> Even though this isn't covered by the GPL the author of the driver 
> or the changes could still give the permission to do so.
> 
> I whish there was a better exchange between kernel fbdev developers
> and driver developers here.

Maybe a decision on both parts on this would be ok ? XFree86 could make
sure the licence of the driver code would not conflict with the GPL,
keeping the old one for example, and the fbdev driver authors would
dual-licence the code, both GPL and the old xfree86 licence would do
just fine. Benjamin, what do you think about this ?

BTW, CCing this to the linux-fbdev mailing list.

Friendly,

Sven Luther


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