Re: X.org plans for the lenny cycle

[David Nusinow <dnusinow@speakeasy.net>]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2008 at 03:06:57PM +1100, Niv Sardi wrote:
> I forwarded that information internaly to my manager about a week ago
> (after a discution with jcristeau), I believe that the message is:
> * If it affects only Debian SGI (as a corporation) will not care and
> treat us as a bunch of nitpickers hippies.
>   (julien sent me a link I can't find now where fedora seemed to state
> that they had the same concerns)

You probably won't find it. I had a private discussion with a RedHat
employee who mentioned that their lawyers were interested in resolving
issues with licenses like FreeB for practical reasons. I don't know exactly what became of it. 

Also of note is that Brett Smith from the FSF is working on this problem
privately right now, and while he isn't able to report on any of the
discussions publicly he does claim to be making some headway.

> * It is possible that SGI doesn't own the code anymore (and that Khronos does)
> 
> On Feb 11, 2008 2:20 PM, Aníbal Monsalve Salazar <anibal@debian.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 12:46:30PM +1000, Drew Parsons wrote:
> > >On Fri, 2007-04-13 at 11:38 +1000, Aníbal Monsalve Salazar wrote:
> > >>On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 11:06:19AM +1000, Drew Parsons wrote:
> > >>>
> > >>>A long-standing bug which should be thought about is the GL licensing
> > >>>problem [1].  SGI kindly contributed code for GL support in X, but their
> > >>>licence is not DSFG.  Upstream is not comfortable with the situation
> > >>>either and there have been intentions to approach colleagues at SGI to
> 
> Then we should contact SGI all together...
> 
> > >>>see about rationalising the licence, to the common X11 licence or
> > >>>otherwise.  However these correspondences proceed at a glacial
> > >>>corporate rate - not high on corporate SGI's TODO list, you might say.
> > >>>We've conveniently been ignoring the problem for Debian stable, do we
> > >>>continue doing so, or are we capable of prodding SGI to accelerate the
> > >>>discussions?  Or do we ditch OpenGL support from Debian... ?
> 
> Please let's not make these kinds of calls,...

Indeed. I don't see any benefit to doing something rash in this case.
Outright removal of the code won't make it Free any faster, nor are there
people lining up to reimplement it.

 - David Nusinow