Re: misfits

On Sun, Apr 04, 2004 at 10:22:20AM +0100, Andrew C Aitchison wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Apr 2004, Sven Luther wrote:
> 
> > BTW, please tell me which major distro (apart from slackware apparently)
> > did go for 4.4 ? And listing a whole page of mostly obscure distros is
> > not really a point in your favor. What of Suze, Redhat, Mandrake,
> > Debian, Yellow Dog Linux, Gentoo ? None of them are touching stuff with
> > these new licences, and they represent the major part of the linux
> > userbase, which mostly makes XFree86 irrelevant for the future. As for
> > *BSDish distros, only one out of 3 major distros did go your way.
> 
> I don't remember any of these distributions making statements to that 
> effect in this list. Could you point me at such statements elsewhere ?

Short memory then. I think we heard the X responsible for at least
Debian and Suse speak about this here, and others have commented
elsewhere ?

> > This is a sad thing, but it was your choice to go that way, and altough
> > i disagree with this, i respect your choice. You should not put your
> > head in the sand though, and accept full responsability for that.
> 
> The people responsible for this change (OK I know that they don't 
> believe it *is* a change) don't defend it in this list.
> 
> Therefore I have no rational basis for believing that this *is* the 
> correct list for discussion of the licence change.

Why, forum is the right place for this. It was designed for technical
and political discussions about XFree86, and first used for that during
the first discussion about this one year ago.

> Can anyone tell me:
> 
> A) What is the correct forum for discussion of the licence change ?
> 
> B) What is the list [email protected] really for ?

Here is what i paste to misguided people thinking forum is for user
support : 

  First, this mailing list is not the right place for asking such
  questions, the [email protected] is a place for discussion of the future
  of XFree86, both on the political and techological levels. The correct
  place for such a question would be the Xfree86 support mailing list :
  [email protected] or even better yet your distribution vendor XFree86
  support mailing list, in this case RedHat.

Since the technical aspect has dissapeared, and the list has been almost
silent until the licence change, i guess only the politicking remains.

> Given Sven's statement about other distros and the continued absence
> of any formal reaction to it I'm coming to the conclusion that:
> 
> 1) This list is pointless
> 
> 2) Much as I believe that the licence change was only a clarification
> and right, it appears that it has made XFree86 irrelevant.
> 
> I am sorry that the GPL appears to have triumphed over the X11 licence;
> it this think this is a bad thing for the open source software and 
> for the world in general.

I don't think this has anything to do with the GPL really, the old X11
licence did do just fine, and everyone was happy with it.

> Anybody care to prove that there is life in XFree86 ?
> 
> Anyone interested in taking over leadership of XFree86,
> given that the current leader appears to have driven us into a hole
> and shows no sign of getting us out ?
> (I'm not interested in this thankless task, I'm afraid).

Well, i believe there are already at least two forks (or revival of
older branches, or whatever) already ready to take its place. This is a
sad thing, and i tried to warn the XFree86 Project about the
consequences of the move, but you see how Georgina responds to me about
this kind of things. And i was on XFree86 side, even had to weather
sarcasm and insults of Branden and his croonies over it.

Friendly,

Sven Luther