Re: Re: Driver Development vs. X Development

Roberto J Dohnert wrote:
> The other issue about Sun making contributions and using Suns own 
> technology in XFree86.  I am a little cautious about this myself.  If we take 
> Sun technology and incorporate it, what not to keep Sun from coming back in a 
> few years if it starts going bankrupt, to claim Intellectual Property claims, 
> similar to what SCO is doing.  I am not saying they would and what I am 
> saying would probably never happen in a million years, but I am leary about 
> Corporate involvement because if bad gets to worse and they try to claim 
> Intellectual Property, they have more funds for counsel than a volunteer 
> project does.  

It's far too late to worry about corporate involvement in X.  Sun would not be
the first company contributing to XFree86 - and much of the original X code
from the consortium carries a copyright notice from some corporation or another.
Just look through the existing code and you'll find dozens of examples - 
Xinerama came from DEC, the Render code carries a SuSE copyright (being the
employer of Keith Packard when it was written), the RandR code lists Compaq &
HP as copyright holders, and much of the i18n support in Xlib already came from
Sun.  The copyright to the core of the code from the original X11R6.* releases
is now owned by The Open Group, an industry consortium made up of hundreds of
companies.

As for the SCO lawsuit against IBM, they claim IBM gave SCO's IP to Linux 
without SCO's permission.  The procedures we have to go through at Sun to
donate code to XFree86 insist that we can only donate code created by Sun
and not from a third party to avoid situations just like that.  This is also
nothing new for Sun - you'll find copyright notices in X alone going back to
1986 for Sun, and it's just one of the dozens of open source projects Sun has
contributed to since it was founded in 1982.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-      [email protected]
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc.   -   Sun Software Group
	 Quality, Integration, & Customer Success (QICS)
	 Platform Globalization Engin. - X11 Engineering