Re: Re: About our effort at NoMachine

On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 05:24:19AM +0100, Gian Filippo Pinzari wrote:
> On Tuesday 25 March 2003 01:13 am, Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
> >
> NX Client for Windows IS a X server for the Win32 platform
> (based on the Cygwin port) plus the compression software, plus
> ssh client, plus some other software, plus the NX GUI that makes
> things work together.
> 
> > > - NX core software is based on XFree86, OpenSSH,
> > >   RDesktop, VNC and other OpenSource components.
> > >   All X related stuff developed by NoMachine has
> > >   been released under GPL.
> >
> > Well, probably you didn't have much choice, since you based
> > everything upon a few Free software components?   ;-)
> 
> Not exactly. The most important and most valuable parts of the software
> we wrote are derived from X or from other components that were under X
> license. X license doesn't require modifications to be released as X or other
> OSS licenses. Infact we didn't release our modifications under X license.
> We chose GPL because we want to prevent closed source modifications
> of core NX software. Furthermore, some other parts were developed from
> scratch, as the Xcompext library that gives you that nice compression of
> thumbnails :-). That said, we don't want a medal, but would like at least
> be considered good OSS citizens :-).
> 
> > What other stuff have you developed to be included in NX that
> > is not under GPL?
> 
> The top level software. Everything you can do with NX Client and
> NX Server can be done by hand, using OSS components. We
> count on users being lazy.

What is the op level software?

Can your code be backported into XFree86?
Or are there problems with the license (GPL vs X license)?
Would that be a major task?

I think X really needs an optimization of the protocol like that to progress.

What did you do? Just compession of the protocol?

Best regards
keld