Re: License issue, and a possible solution

Kurt Fitzner wrote:
> Think of it this way.  Would people be paying as much for products like 
> Hummingbird or other commercial X servers if those companies had to 
> acknowledge that they stripped much of their code from XFree86?  

If they are using code from XFree86, they already had to acknowledge it
in their copyright statements.  Acknowledging it even more wouldn't change
how much most people would be willing to pay for a product from any of the
commercial X-for-Windows vendors.

> In GPL, commercial companies wouldn't be able to use the code at all.

Completely untrue.

> With BSD (and the similar 1.0 XFree license), commercial companies can 
 > use the code, and hide teh fact to their customers.

Again completely untrue.

> I have a niggling suspicion that perhaps GPL-compatibility has little to 
> do with the issue.  Call me a "conspiracy theorist", but look at the 
> names associated with X.ORG in big letters on the home page...
> Hummingbird, WRQ, IBM, HP, Sun.  The first two are companies that 
> produce their own commercial X servers.  The last 3 are large commercial 
> UNIX vendors.  All organizations who might want to produce their own X 
> server and not have to put "Uses code from the XFree86 Project" in their 
> product.  

Sun already includes XFree86 copyright notices and acknowledgements of
various other forms in both Solaris and the Java Desktop System for Linux, so
you can count us out of your conspiracy theory.

A simple search for "XFree86" on http://www.sun.com will find pages crediting
XFree86 in various ways, such as:
http://developers.sun.com/solaris/developer/support/driver/tools/video/video-index.html

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           [email protected]
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering