On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 01:06:23PM +0000, Andrew C Aitchison wrote:
> > 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.The only authors that legally matter are the ones listed in the copyright notices. There are three copyright notices in the matroxfb stuff: one is Petr, another is Gerd Knorr and the other is Matrox. I'm sure Petr has a pretty clear idea what he wrote, and I doubt Gerd would get an attitude with you either over anything he did. Since you haven't even inquired about it, you don't have much to complain about as I see it. > 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. Or maybe the license incompatibility was simply a convenient way to cop out of doing some work? > > > So, for one developer at least, the reason there has been no traffic > > > from fbdev to XFree86 is *directly* because of the licence issue. You can't copy and paste code. You _can_ rewrite code. Hardware interfaces, trivial routines, and problems for which there exist only one or a few obvious ways of solving them are all examples of where copyright does not apply. Porting any code from fbdev to a XFree86 driver *will* involve substantial rewriting. I know this because I'm currently doing it for the mga driver. > > 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 ? No. The aim of open source licenses is to allow people to use the code _under the terms the author chose_ without tracking down the author and obtaining extra permissions. > I can do that with closed source. I don't see how you have greater freedom with closed source licenses, but feel free to elaborate. -- Ryan Underwood, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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