Gene Heskett wrote: > That blame is miss-placed. Trouble had been brewing at XFree for > quite a while, and the license change was the straw that effectively > broke the camels back. The new XFree license is, AIUI, incompatible > with the GPL. And anything thats not compatible with the GPL or the > LGPL, isn't welcome in any distro unless they have sufficient legal > staff to defend themselves from any potential copyright problems. > That sort of thing is an exposure no one needs. Only M$ can afford > to take that chance since they have rather large reserves. I mostly want to agree with you, here. It wasn't the license change itself that was the big problem: the only parts of XFree86 affected were the "other side" of the highly documented X network interface, on the X server (= what talks to the hardware) side. And there isn't any GPL code anywhere near that, as I understand it: it wouldn't be acceptable to the BSDs. The big problem, as I see it, is that the license change was imposed without discussion, without any assurance that it wouldn't be applied on the client side (which *does* have to work with GPL code), the storms of protest were ignored, and that this seemed typical of the project: XFree86 was delaring that it could and would impose such changes. This is where the problem lies, and where the MySQL problem lay: what isn't welcome is maintainers that act without consideration of what their actions will do to the rest of the community, and aren't prepared to sometimes accept that they're wrong. A legal or code *!#$ you, if you will. And programmers can work around code. Now, a stand-alone project (or one that doesn't need to *link* against GPL code) using a GPL-incompatible (but Free Software) license is acceptable. For example, older releases of Vim or Apache had non-GPL compatible licenses (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses). James. -- E-mail address: james | Whenever [Richard I] returned to England he always @westexe.demon.co.uk | set out again immediately for the Mediterranean and | was therefore known as Richard Gare de Lyon. | -- '1066 and All That'
