On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 03:38:29PM -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> I would be willing to relicense my contribution to the synaptics driver
> for X in order to resolve the GPL/X11 conflict. I am in contact with
> Warren Turkal <wturkal@cbu.edu> in this regard. Send me the X patch
> with the appropriate license text changes made and I will sign off on it.
> Unforunately, I am only one of several authors (see version history at
> http://cscott.net/Projects/Synaptics/ ), but it's a start.
Thanks very much for contacting me.
I feel I should make a clarification, though.
There is no license conflict per se between the terms of the GNU GPL and
the MIT/X11 license.
The XFree86 Project, Inc., has a *policy* of not accepting any code
under the GNU GPL into their codebase. In fact, their policy is
supposedly that all code must be under something pretty close to the
MIT/X11 license or the so-called "3-clause BSD" license. However, they
have been known to make exceptions.
Code under the GNU GPL has never been of those exceptions, however, and
given certain historical and traditional factors within their Project,
it may never be.
None of this means that *Debian* cannot include a GPLed input driver in
our XFree86 packages. It just means that we should not endeavor to get
our upstream to attempt to include it.
To date, I have never added any patches to the upstream XFree86 source
code in Debian's packages that were not under the MIT/X11 license terms.
This is for a couple of reasons:
1) I wanted it to be easy to submit our patches upstream without
licensing headaches;
2) The XFree86 distribution is well known for being under a
non-copyleft license. If Debian's XFree86 packages carry the whiff
of GNU GPL, people might be bound to its copyleft terms without
their knowledge.
While 2) is probably not a practical concern with respect to an input
driver, it's very important for things like the shared libraries in the
XFree86 distribution.
Anyway, sorry for the length of this message. I welcome your efforts to
alter the licensing on the Synaptics touchpad driver to MIT/X11 terms,
since if you are successful it will save me the trouble of rethinking my
patch-licensing policy.
I did, however, want to be sure you understood that there is no
"licensing conflict" per se. The licenses are perfectly compatible,
both are DFSG-free, and both are perfectly acceptable to the Debian
Project (and to me personally for that matter). An example of a pair of
licensed that are *not* compatible are the Apache license and the GNU
GPL.
If you do relicense, I want to be sure you do so on an informed basis,
and do not feel misled later.
If there is anything I can help you with, please let me know, and I will
if I can.
--
G. Branden Robinson | Psychology is really biology.
Debian GNU/Linux | Biology is really chemistry.
branden@debian.org | Chemistry is really physics.
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | Physics is really math.
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