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

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

On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 08:13:45AM -0500, Harold L Hunt II wrote:
> Sven Luther wrote:
> 
> >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.
> 
> Wild accusations?  How do you get wild accusations from pointing out 
> that there "may be 27 authors of the relevant file"?  If anyone is 
> making wild accusations, it is you.  Andrew simply stated the point that 

Ok, sorry, shouldn't have said it so, maybe it was a bit exagerated.
Still this is degenerating in GPL bashing, which will bring us nowhere.
And if you didn't make the effort to ask at least once, where will we
go. I am sure that a post to the linux-fbdev mailing list would have
solved everything, or maybe the main maintainer of the matroxfb driver ?

> this is not an issue about proving whether *one* file doesn't have 
> issues; rather, it is the issue of having to prove that *all* files do 
> not have issues, and many of these files may be just as messy in 
> authorship as Andrew is suggesting.

Still, there is a mailing list where all linux fbdev authors are, or at
least most of them, and bitkeeper will mostly give us full history, so i
doubt it is as bad as you say.

Also, most fbdev authors have also been XFree86 contributors in the
past, so i don't really know what the problem is here.

Friendly,

Sven Luther


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