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Re: x is dead - non-free



"Tristan Day" <GreenSideburns@csi.com> writes:

> After loads of problems with LSL ( after 2 weeks they wrote back to me
> saying my credit card was out of date because 1/10/98 in England means 1st
> October and over in America it's 10th Jan, and I wrote back correcting them
> but they said that I have to use another card)
> 
> I am facing a real dilemma with Distribution disks. If X becomes non-free,
> there will be no point buying a Debian distribution CD if I am correct<??>
> 
> I mean, if X isn't on there, I'll have to dnld everything anyway, or buy Red
> Hat <??>
> 
> What a pain. X is a large part of Debian, it's stupid to make it non-free...

As has been said many, many times, all the annoucement means is that
X11R6.4 from the open group will become non-free.  X11R6.3 will remain 
free - there's nothing the Open group can do about this.  And the
XFree86 people will continue develop, support, and improve their X
stuff. (and so we may very well see XFree86 producing their own
X11R6.4)

So, in short: DON'T PANIC.
X will remain a part of Debian now and in the foreseeable future;
futermore, it will remain free.  (this is one reason the DFSG are
written the way they are - once free, always free [1])  X development
may be slowed down a bit, but I don't at the moment see any reason to
be worried by that.

[1] This doesn't mean that one can't create a DFSG free product, and
    then decide to make subsequent versions of the product non-free.
    However, the versions that are released with DFSG compatible
    licences will _always_ be DFSG free.


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