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

On Sat, 31 Jan 2004, Sven Luther wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 09:10:22AM +0000, Andrew C Aitchison wrote:
> > For several years the mga fb kernel driver has supported dual head and/or
> > dvi on cards which aren't supported by the XFree86 driver (unless you
> > use the mga_hal). I've wanted to use kernel code to add this support to 
> > XFree86, but been put off by the licence problem.
> 
> And, have you asked the mgafb driver author about this ?
> 
> You can hardly complain about lack of back traffic if you didn't ask him
> about it, and if you did, it would be interesting to this discussion to
> know what the problems where.

"The Author" ?
This is open source code; there may be 27 authors of the relevant file.
In XFree86 code I wouldn't know how to find the author of a file without
looking at that file. My {limited ,mis}understanding of clean room coding 
makes me wary of reading any source unless I know that its licence will 
allow me to do what I wish.

OK. So I've probably been paranoid and lazy, but if the fbdev licence 
had been compatible with the XFree86 one, I would have done the work.
As it is the bar was raised high enough to stop me.

> > So, for one developer at least, the reason there has been no traffic
> > from fbdev to XFree86 is *directly* because of the licence issue.
> 
> Yeah, but again, was it so because of a definite will on the fbdev
> authors part, or because you didn't ask him ?

Isn't the aim of open source licences is to allow people to use the code
without tracking down the author and obtaining permission ?
I can do that with closed source.

-- 
Andrew C. Aitchison					Cambridge
			[email protected]



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