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

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 01:06:23PM +0000, Andrew C Aitchison wrote:
> 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.

This is not acceptable. You are making wild accusations, and didn't even
try to contact the relevant people. To my knowledge, Petr is the sole
author of matroxfb, and there should not have been any problem in at
least asking him about this.

> 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.

Yeah, whatever, but with you asking that the fbdev drivers change their
licence, it is the same thing as the GPL zealots not liking the new
XFree86 licence. 

The way to solve this is by cooperation, not by staying aloft and
pointing the finger to the opposite side.

> > > 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 ?

Yes. But the aim of GPLed code is that those author give you the
permission, but also force you to give back the changes you do under the
same licence. And altough i contribute to project with the licence the
project choose, i would never choose something else as the GPL for my
own projects. If someone else wants access to the code, they can ask me
for it, and we can discuss stuff and arrive to an arrangement.

> I can do that with closed source.

Well, the only reason you need to contact the author is because you want
some additional right from him, if your project was GPLed, it was no
problem.

Friendly,

Sven Luther


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