On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 11:19:00PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > Hi guys, > > Bug#211765, "xfree86: material under non-free licenses in XFree86" > appears to have been languishing for a few months now, without anyone > trying to talk to the copyright holders to see if this stuff can be > relicensed in a DFSG-free fashion. It's worth noting this bug was tagged "help" about 3 days after it was filed. Thanks for contributing to my call for assistance. > Is there someone on this list who's interested in talking to upstream > copyright holders and trying to work through possible DFSG conflicts > like these? That usually means either presenting a convincing argument > that what they want is actually more harmful than it seems in practical > terms, or that there's some better way of achieving the same goal, > without running afoul of the DFSG. That's not particularly easy, and > can often be not particularly fruitful, but promoting free software > principles to people who're inclined to write non-free licenses is one > of the things we're meant to be doing. Indeed; and one unfortunate possibility may be that the copyright holders would be just as content to see Debian ship this software in the non-free section. > So, is there anyone here with the time and energy to look into this issue, > and ideally others? I think someone willing to tackle this one would be ideal enough for the time being, as it doesn't just affect XFree86. Mesa uses much of the same code. Particularly valuable in this particular case would probably be someone who is a known quantity to SGI. -- G. Branden Robinson | Never attribute to malice that Debian GNU/Linux | which can be adequately explained branden@debian.org | by stupidity. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Hanlon's Razor
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