On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 09:26:23AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote: >On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 02:39:01AM -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote: >> 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. > >I cannot agree with that. The new XFree86 licence is indeed free >software, at least as far as Debian is concerned, or so Branden told me. > >The real problem here is not about the freeness of the licence, but >about the GPL incompatibility of it, which is problematic for the client >side libraries. > >There seems to be a tentative agreement to not change the licence on >these client side libraries, but only on the server code, which should >make any arguments here mostly moot. David, any advancement on this ?
There won't be any licence changes for the client-side libraries in 4.4.0. However, libGL is (and was) problematic from a strict GPL interpretation point of view, because the licence for the GLX code (client and server side) is classified as non-free by the FSF. David _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
