Re: License issues

On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 07:50:01PM +0100, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
>DD> The licensing *policy* has not changed.  XFree86 has exercised the
>DD> same freedom of licensing choice that it has been offering its
>DD> contributors for some time.
>
>David,
>
>You keep ignoring one important objection to the licence change.
>
>A lot of the XFree86 code has been contributed under the XFree86
>licence by people who were acting under the assumption that their code
>would remain under the old licence.

Their code does.  See below.  Only a weakening of a licence can
effectively nullify licences that apply to past versions of code,
as the Berkeley relicensing demonstrates.  You can't get much weaker
than the old XFree86 licence.  Even some variants of the MIT/X11
licence (there are several) and the 2&3-clause BSD licences are
stronger.

>The licencing change has apparently been decided single handedly by
>you, without consulting most contributors (for my part, I learnt about
>the change from the press).

If it were me alone, I would have simply applied a licence of this
type to all of my contributions to XFree86.

>I believe this to be a case of mis-governance.  Until this question is
>settled, it will be difficult for many contributors (including myself)
>to trust the XFree86 governing body (i.e. you).

You keep ignoring the fact that the change is not retroactive.
Therefore everything that existed under the old licence may continue
to be used under the old licence.  The projects reusing XFree86
are aware of this, and are doing exactly that.  Where the licence
really has an affect is for *future* contributions where the
contributor *chooses* to use the new-style licence.  As to your
specific past contributions, there are few (if any) that are even
in files affected by the change.

For future contributions, the contributor is free to 1) choose the
licence for their contributions within the same guidelines as before
(which permit the full-blown traditional BSD advertising clause),
and 2) retain copyright ownership of their contributions as before.
If you and others wish to use a weak licence for your work, then
that is entirely up to you.

David