Re: misfits
Andrew C Aitchison <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.xfree86.forum |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Sun, 4 Apr 2004, Marc Aurele La France wrote: > On Sun, 4 Apr 2004, Andrew C Aitchison wrote: > > > 2) Much as I believe that the licence change was only a clarification > > and right, it appears that it has made XFree86 irrelevant. > > Irrelevant to whom? Like most, you make an assumption that this project exists > to service those who would make money off of it, or even merely use the > software. It doesn't, and never has. It has always been the case that the > project provides an avenue through which developers can scratch their itches. > ... And those who have benefitted from a free ride are understandably miffed. I plead slightly guilty to being miffed that my free ride has gone. We were big Red Hat users at work. I felt comfortable not buying RedHat licences for our machines because I was contributing to XFree86 which they shipped - payment in kind if you like. Since Red Hat have dropped support for anything but Enterprise Linux, I'm under pressure to move to Debian, which has a strong following in Cambridge, or possibly to SuSE. It seems that none of these will ship XFree86 v4.4, so I'm not comfortable using work equipment (and maybe work time) to contribute to XFree86. So yes, I mean irrelevant to me, but no, I had assumed/hoped that I could scratch my itch in the best place (XFree86), and have that code come back to the systems on my desktops. Georgina: > Actually you're wrong. When linux started it was nothing and now > proprietary Unix is dying because of this little' obscurity. > History is on their side. Maybe, Georgina is right, in the long run I'm are backing the wrong distros, and those who are sticking with XFree86 will win. [This isn't the place to say that I'm worried by Sun taking Microsoft's money to settle the Java case.] -- Andrew C. Aitchison Cambridge [email protected]