On 2025/06/25 5:21, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
Chris Adams wrote:
Given the questionable changes made to X.Org by the lead (only?)
developer of X11Libre before being removed from the project, including
possible license violations
The "license violations" are actually moving a few lines of mostly trivial
declarations from one header file to another without copying the copyright
notice.
As I wrote in
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/veto-x11libre-replacing-xorg-for-fedora/155926/77
:
If you are going to dig into the issue, might as well go all the way.
The `misc.h` file where this originated has been licensed under `MIT AND
X11` since the beginning when the code was written 13 years ago [1].
Whether or not a specific snippet makes sense to have a specific
copyright handling is not a valid debate. They could have either moved
the code with an over complete copyright notice or asked permission from
all the relevant authors of the snippet, which they did not do.
The only explanation I could give is that when they moved the code and
wrote it as `MIT OR X11` would be that they thought it meant "I don't
know, this code might have be under MIT or X11" instead of "you can use
*everything* in here as either MIT or X11". And to be fair, the upstream
`COPYING` file does not explicitly note the license they use and they
have an easy to misinterpret segment `|MIT/X11`, which could be viewed
as a deprecated OR operator in the cargo ecosystem, but I doubt that was
the intent in the COPYING file [2].|
|But the main issue I see is that when confronted with the licensing
issue, those comments were never addressed [3] even though the person in
question was not banned for another 2 months. It hints that this is a
symptom of them not handling such a big project appropriately.|
Also in the post you mentioned
And the fix would be to get the copyright
notice and the SPDX declaration on that new header file fixed
Well, have you submitted a PR for that? You are probably among the few
qualified to work with that upstream given the tone in the README.
They have plenty of opportunities to show that they want to improve the
project in a non-hostile manner, but given that the README remains
unchanged despite a couple of PRs that suggests toning down the voice
(among other gems that you can find in the issue/PR discussions), makes
me doubt that that will be taken seriously.
[1]:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/commit/2abe83df686ed64c4f4df711ac3c1fd12131c2e4
[2]:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/blob/master/COPYING?ref_type=heads#L49-51
[3]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/1804
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