On Sat, 31 Jan 2004, Sven Luther wrote: > On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 09:10:22AM +0000, Andrew C Aitchison wrote: > > For several years the mga fb kernel driver has supported dual head and/or > > dvi on cards which aren't supported by the XFree86 driver (unless you > > use the mga_hal). I've wanted to use kernel code to add this support to > > XFree86, but been put off by the licence problem. > > And, have you asked the mgafb driver author about this ? > > You can hardly complain about lack of back traffic if you didn't ask him > about it, and if you did, it would be interesting to this discussion to > know what the problems where.
"The Author" ? This is open source code; there may be 27 authors of the relevant file. In XFree86 code I wouldn't know how to find the author of a file without looking at that file. My {limited ,mis}understanding of clean room coding makes me wary of reading any source unless I know that its licence will allow me to do what I wish. OK. So I've probably been paranoid and lazy, but if the fbdev licence had been compatible with the XFree86 one, I would have done the work. As it is the bar was raised high enough to stop me. > > So, for one developer at least, the reason there has been no traffic > > from fbdev to XFree86 is *directly* because of the licence issue. > > Yeah, but again, was it so because of a definite will on the fbdev > authors part, or because you didn't ask him ? Isn't the aim of open source licences is to allow people to use the code without tracking down the author and obtaining permission ? I can do that with closed source. -- Andrew C. Aitchison Cambridge [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel