[d-kernel] [dawes@XFree86.Org: Re: Announcement: Modification to the base XFree86(TM) license.]

Sat Jan 31 19:40:24 MSK 2004

FYI.

----- Forwarded message from David Dawes <dawes at XFree86.Org> -----

Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 12:42:44 -0500
From: David Dawes <dawes at XFree86.Org>
To: devel at xfree86.org
Cc: forum at xfree86.org
Subject: Re: Announcement: Modification to the base XFree86(TM) license.
User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i
In-Reply-To: <1075423804.12536.28.camel at gaston>; from benh at kernel.crashing.org on Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 11:50:40AM +1100
Reply-To: devel at xfree86.org

On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 11:50:40AM +1100, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
>On Fri, 2004-01-30 at 03:58, David Dawes wrote:
>> Announcement: Modification to the base XFree86(TM) license.
>> 
>> After a thorough re-examination of the XFree86(TM) license and reviewing
>> how it fits in with the Project's long-stated licensing philosophy ("You
>> can do what you like with the code except claim that you wrote it."),
>> The XFree86 Project, Inc. has made some changes to its base license.
>> This license review was prompted by a desire to ensure that XFree86 and
>> its contributors are receiving due credit for their work.  The text of
>> the modified license can be found at
>> <http://www.xfree86.org/legal/licenses.html>.
>>
>> .../...
>
>Hi David !
>
>I'm no license/legal expert, but do that mean the licence becomes GPL
>incompatible ? In that case, that basically means you are screwing up
>any effort to make a decent graphics driver model in the linux kernel.
>
>If I'm wrong on that, you can skip the rest of this email.
>
>We rely heavily on the XFree drivers as those are updated & maintained
>by the card vendors or people working for them ("nv" by Mark Vojkovich,
>"radeon" by Hui Yu).
>
>Losing the ability of porting code straight from these to the fbdev
>drivers will basically kill all my efforts to turn the kernel radeonfb
>into a decent driver as I need to be able to re-use the code ATI puts
>in the XFree version. I suppose the same will happen to linux rivafb.
>
>So right when we are considering a new & saner video driver model for
>Linux, you are doing this move which screws up by blocking us from our
>primary source of information & support from the gfx card vendors.

Ben,

On looking through the fbdev drivers in the Linux kernel source, I see
very few cases where license notices from XFree86 driver source are
included.  This means that either the license for these drivers has no
impact on the work you are talking about (making what you have written
above moot), or some authors of portions of the current Linux fbdev code
have violated the terms of the existing licenses by not including a
verbatim copy of the copyright, license notice, and disclaimer text in
relevant source code.

I would also like to echo Egbert's comments about the one-way nature of
your concerns.

David
-- 
David Dawes
developer/release engineer                      The XFree86 Project
www.XFree86.org/~dawes
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