Re: XFree86 is changing their license
On Sat, Feb 21, 2004 at 10:27:26AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> Ok, another (and probably last) followup on the licence problem. The
> XFree86 project has released a FAQ accompanying the licence at :
>
> http://www.xfree86.org/legal/licenses.html
>
> The important points being :
>
> o The licence is said to be free, probably DFSG free, not sure though.
> The sole restriction is that : if there are ackonwledgement for third
> party software (as opposed to artwork and other non software, probably
> documentation and other text data), then xfree86 should also be
> acknowlegded in the same way.
>
> o The licence is GPL incompatible due to the above restriction.
>
> o The licence will not be applied to client-side libraries :
>
> "The 1.1 license is not GPL-compatible. To avoid new issues with
> application programs that may be licensed under the GPL, the 1.1
> licence is not being applied to client side libraries."
>
> So, i guess the only remaining problems are :
>
> 1) Is the above restriction compatible with the DFSG. I think it will
> be for debian-legal to tell.
>
> 2) Are there other GPLed projects which reuse the relicenced code ? If so,
> they can either fork it, or obtain another agreement with the
> corresponding copyright holder of the project. I doubt this really is
> a problem.
>
> 3) Well, all the other licencing problems Branden noticed, but this is
> not related to the licence change, and often go back to before the 4.0
> XFree86 release. Hopefully they can be fixed.
>
> Ok, i am ccing this to debian-legal, in order to have their opinion,
> please CC me in replies if you drop debian-private, since i am not
> subscribed to debian-legal.
>
> All in all, i believe that this change didn't warrant the whole
> excitment that was made with the announcement of the licence change,
> altough i think it was salutable as it allowed us to find the other
> licencing issues, thanks go to Branden for that (and for the 4.3.0
> release to unstable, well to Branden and the rest of the X Strike
> Force), i think, contrary to others, that the discussion with X upstream
> i have followed was rather civil, and if there still are problems, they
> can be easily solved. All the remaining huge problems are, i think, of
> political and project leadership power struggle nature, which i think is
> a sad thing.
I concur fully with this assessment.
--
Ben Reser <ben@reser.org>
http://ben.reser.org
"Conscience is the inner voice which warns us somebody may be looking."
- H.L. Mencken
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