What will be new in FC3 ?

[James Wilkinson]

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'