Re: Re: [forum] Re: Announcement: Modification to the base XFree86(TM) license.

[Ryan Underwood <nemesis-lists@icequake.net>]

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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, <nemesis@icequake.net>

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