On Tue, 17 Feb 2004, David Dawes wrote:
>Also check the LICENSE document
><http://www.xfree86.org/~dawes/pre-4.4/LICENSE.html>. There is a lot
>of FUD being circulated about the licensing, so check here for the facts.
>Also check out the FSF's Free Software definition and their list of
>licenses, as well as the OSI's Open Source Definition. There are links
>to these sites from our LICENSE document. In particular, follow up with
>the BSD licences (original and revised), the FreeType License (FTL),
>the SGI Free Software License (which applies to GLX and CID), and the
>Apache 1.1 licence.
>
>Don't rely on the FUD being circulated by people who can barely hide
>their prejudice. Go straight to the definitive sources on licensing
>issues, namely the FSF and the OSI, and come to your own conclusions.
So I must totally agree with you David. People should indeed
go to the definitive sources on open source licensing issues, the
FSF and the OSI.
Interestingly enough, neither the XFree86 license version 1.0,
nor the new 1.1 license are listed as OSI approved open source
licenses:
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.php
Going to the Free Software Foundations site to see their list of
approved free software licenses, the XFree86 license version 1.0
and 1.1 are also noteably missing:
http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html
The FSF does have the following:
"The X11 license.
This is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license,
compatible with the GNU GPL. XFree86 uses the same license. This
is sometimes called the "MIT" license, but that term is
misleading since MIT has used many licenses for software."
However that statement is inaccurate, as the parts of the
XFree86 source code which are copyright by XFree86.org, are
under either the XFree86 license version 1.0, or XFree86 license
version 1.1.
The simple conclusion, is that XFree86 is not free software, as
defined by the Free Software Foundation nor open source software
as defined by the Open Source Initiative, however there are a few
inaccuracies present on both of these websites which need to be
fixed, in order to not mislead people into beleiving XFree86 is
MIT/X11 licensed.
Of course, others should visit both websites and draw their own
conclusions also, which will help to cut down on the "FUD" going
around.
--
Mike A. Harris
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