Re: XFree86 4.4.0 RC3

> My point all along has been that the XFree86 licensing policy has not
> changed.  If it is bad now, it was bad before.  Why wasn't anyone
> complaining before?
I hope my FQDN does not negatively impact my remarks but ... if no-one 
was complaining before why are you so determined to change the license? 
I remember the vague details of the mail thread that I think lead up to 
this. People were contributing code and were not being correctly 
attributed for their work. The way I see it, there are two ways to fix 
that problem. The first way (and one I would have personally chosen) is 
to be more diligent in producing release notes and in including the 
correct attributions. The second way, the one you seem to have opted 
for, is to change the license.

I respect your opinions considerably. You have always struck me as being 
very reasonable and fair. However, if I may be so bold as to point 
something out, you seem to be a bit blinded on this issue, or at the 
very least,a more fervent proponent of it than the original problem 
warrants.

I am assuming that for someone who has devoted as much time and energy 
to a project as you have that a change that would place its future 
adoption in jeopardy would be something you would fight against, not 
for. I dont belong to any Debian or other Linux lists so information I 
have on this is second-hand based on postings to this list, but if the 
license change is so unpallettable to people that major free software 
distributions are no longer willing to distribute XFree86, then 
regardless of any merits of the new license change, regardless of 
whether the objections are because of FUD or misinterpretation or even 
plain malevolence, it would seem that the prudent course of action would 
be to not change the license for the 4.4 release and take more time 
either fixing people's opinions or fixing the wording of the license.

One final point to consider (it may already have been considered, I 
confess I dont read absolutely every piece of mail on this subject). 
Suppose there is a file foo.c in the distribution. It is currently 
licensed under version 1.0 of the XFree license. The people who 
contributed the code or made changes to it did so with the assumption 
that that was the license that would be applied to the code. If that 
license is now simply changed to 1.1, would you not need the permission 
of every single contributor to do so? Even if you can legally prove that 
no rights or priveliges granted under the old license are taken away by 
the new, perhaps the new restrictions placed by the 1.1 license would be 
unacceptable to the original contributors. I realize that the original 
license does not require that, but I think good faith does. Since some 
of the contributors of that old code have very clearly spoken up here 
and objected to the new license (and the reasons for their objectsions 
are really not germaine) I think if you proceed with the license change 
that you do so knowing that you are doing so against the contributors 
wishes, and you are likely to scare off very valued developers.

Kean

PS. If the term 'you' here is inappropriately specific to you David, and 
more appropriately interpreted as a royal 'you' that means the XFree86 
board, then please interpret it that way.