Re: License issues

On Sun, Mar 07, 2004 at 06:10:25PM -0600, Ryan Underwood wrote:

>As it is now, the XFree86 license reflects the "worst-case" licenses

The "worst-case" is actually a little worse -- SGI's GLX licence,
which is not only GPL-incompatible, but is not "Free Software" (in
the FSF sense).  So, the X server and the GL libraries have been
GPL-incompatible since at least XFree86 4.0 for this reason alone.

>that were already being used by individual contributors, and to me it
>does nothing but make clear what distributors must do in order to comply
>with the license of the entire XFree86 distribution.  Distributors whining
>about the license "change" conveniently ignore the fact that they were
>already distributing code in violation of the contributors' licenses.

This and the GLX issue beg obvious questions of many distributors
and other projects using pre-licence-change versions of XFree86.

Maybe they can all make some sort of clear statement about their
licensing policy so that eveyone knows where they stand.  A little
consistency would go a long way.

David