more licence red-herrings

The notion that some are pushing that the licensing of the headers and
libraries that make up a public API somehow affects applications that
use the API is yet another licensing red herring.  I have stated publicly
that I do not subscribe to this novel little FSF-promoted view of derived
works.  Anyone who wishes to interpret licensing, and XFree86 licensing
in particular, in that way is creating phantom problems of their own
making.  So, even if the XFree86 public libraries and headers were under
the 1.1 licence (which they are not), it would in no way impose any new
requirements on applications that simply use those public interfaces.

The public libraries in XFree86 remain under a license considered
acceptable by most authors who apply the GPL to their work.  This is a
concession that was made to neutralise what was the most reasonable of
the objections to the XFree86 1.1 licence.  The way that this has been
received (ignored, misrepresented, etc) speaks volumes.

A little consistency would be nice too.  How many distros still ship
the GPL-incompatible GL libraries?  They were still in the x.org tree
and release last I checked.  Nobody seems to be concerned about this.
Why?

The discriminatory manner in which the XFree86 1.1 licence is being
treated is disturbing.  I have yet to see self-consistent licensing
policies, applied without exception, published by the distros, vendors,
the likes of the new x.org foundation, and others that would justify
this.  That also speaks volumes.

No, this is discrimination, plain and simple, and XFree86 will not pander
to discriminatory treatment.

David