Re: License furor

William M. Quarles wrote:
> I see that you work for or are associated with Sun Microsystems.  Has 
> Sun decided whether to use X.org releases instead of XFree86 releases or 
> not?  I'm guessing that with the way that you have written that 
> statement, they've made their decision to use X.org releases.

Yes, I work for Sun, in the Solaris X11 group (specifically the group responsible
for the DIX layer of the X server on up to client libraries and core clients like
xterm/xhost/xauth/etc., but we don't do DDX'es).   I can tell you what we're
doing at Sun, but remember, I'm an engineer, not a spokesman, so this is my
view of the work we're doing, not an official corporate statement of direction
or anything like that.   (Hopefully this is obvious in all my posts - I speak
for myself, not Sun - but the lawyers get ancy if I don't point that out sometimes.)

Sun's X server for Solaris has always been based on the X Consortium/X.Org
releases, and we continue to follow that. (*)  We had brought in some features
from XFree86, such as XRender and driver support, while the X.Org releases
were moribund - but those features are now in X.Org as well.  Whether we
continue to pull in features from XFree86 in the future depends on how
XFree86 evolves vs. how X.Org evolves, but right now there's nothing in
XFree86 we need that's not in X.Org, but several of the new extensions under
development by people working with X.Org are things we need for projects like
GNOME Accessibility and Project Looking Glass.

Sun has always been a sponsor of the X Consortium/X.Org and continues to be
a sponsor of the X.Org Foundation.  We have contributed code back to X.Org
for years and continue to do so.

For our Linux releases, we ship whatever the distro ships for X.  For Linux
server products, that's RedHat & SuSE's enterprise server lines.  The
Java Desktop System Linux Edition is currently based on the SuSE Linux
Desktop distro, and simply ships the X server SuSE provides in that. (In
the current releases, that's XFree86 4.3.0 since that was the current
release when SuSE put together SLD 1.0 last year.)  Whether or not that will
change in the future is something I can't comment on since those decisions
are made by the Java Desktop System group, not my group.

(*) Yes, historically speaking the Sun releases were originally very loosely
based on the Consortium release when we shipped X11/NeWS, but that died long
ago and we have been working over time to bring our releases more in line with
the open source releases, and continue to do so.

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