Re: License issues

On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 02:16:37PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:

>And now, you are openly lying to us, trying to say that there is no
>change, that this licence has always been the XFree86 licence, which is
>clearly false, and contrary to what everyone has been lead to believe

I think you need to read what is written, rather than overreacting
to everything.

The licensing *policy* has not changed.  XFree86 has exercised the
same freedom of licensing choice that it has been offering its
contributors for some time.  This is no secret, since there have
been MIT/X11 and GPL-incompatible licences published in our
LICENCE/COPYRIGHT docs for many years.  If people don't actually
go and read those details, then what does that say about the
importance they give to the licences?

A positive consequence of this is has been to wake everyone up from
their misconception that XFree86 was covered as a whole by an
MIT/X11-compatible licence.  That has not been true in a long time.
Now that they are undoubtably and publicly aware of this, they need
to consider how it affects their use and distribution of older
versions of XFree86.  They can't have it both ways.  If licences
incompatible with MIT/X11 or GPL or whatever else are a problem
now, they are problem with previous versions too.

Of course if the real problem is something else, then that's another
matter.

David