On Sat, Feb 21, 2004 at 10:27:26AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote: > Ok, another (and probably last) followup on the licence problem. The > XFree86 project has released a FAQ accompanying the licence at : > > http://www.xfree86.org/legal/licenses.html > > The important points being : > > o The licence is said to be free, probably DFSG free, not sure though. > The sole restriction is that : if there are ackonwledgement for third > party software (as opposed to artwork and other non software, probably > documentation and other text data), then xfree86 should also be > acknowlegded in the same way. > > o The licence is GPL incompatible due to the above restriction. > > o The licence will not be applied to client-side libraries : > > "The 1.1 license is not GPL-compatible. To avoid new issues with > application programs that may be licensed under the GPL, the 1.1 > licence is not being applied to client side libraries." > > So, i guess the only remaining problems are : > > 1) Is the above restriction compatible with the DFSG. I think it will > be for debian-legal to tell. > > 2) Are there other GPLed projects which reuse the relicenced code ? If so, > they can either fork it, or obtain another agreement with the > corresponding copyright holder of the project. I doubt this really is > a problem. > > 3) Well, all the other licencing problems Branden noticed, but this is > not related to the licence change, and often go back to before the 4.0 > XFree86 release. Hopefully they can be fixed. > > Ok, i am ccing this to debian-legal, in order to have their opinion, > please CC me in replies if you drop debian-private, since i am not > subscribed to debian-legal. > > All in all, i believe that this change didn't warrant the whole > excitment that was made with the announcement of the licence change, > altough i think it was salutable as it allowed us to find the other > licencing issues, thanks go to Branden for that (and for the 4.3.0 > release to unstable, well to Branden and the rest of the X Strike > Force), i think, contrary to others, that the discussion with X upstream > i have followed was rather civil, and if there still are problems, they > can be easily solved. All the remaining huge problems are, i think, of > political and project leadership power struggle nature, which i think is > a sad thing.
I concur fully with this assessment. -- Ben Reser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://ben.reser.org "Conscience is the inner voice which warns us somebody may be looking." - H.L. Mencken
