Xfree 4.4?

[ewdi]

Since the potential license jack is coming on Xfree 4.4, will fedora and other vendor will stick with 4.3?

[Ug]

It might be included on the Luvna source.

[mhelios]

Mike A. Harris of Red Hat's XFree86 development, has made it clear they won't include 4.4 under the current licence. Here's his post on the topic:
http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/x-packagers/2004-February/000004.html

[Ug]

Maybe XFree86 will be forced to change their licence for 4.4, if not many distros take it up due to the licencing issues.

[mhelios]

Time will tell...and it's either compete on all levels or die in the rollercoaster software business world. That means as much freedom as possible - hence the inception and success of the GPL and other "free" licences...of course some cashed up companies will just use the brute force monopilistic approach...no names mentioned. <g>

[Ug]

*cough* Micro$oft *cough*

Sorry bad, cough there.

[ewdi]

so many of the core dev has left and now those who are still in there is thinking as capitalist, they do have to remember, there are many codes in xfree 4.4 is written by the community.

[Ug]

The only solution may have to be the creation of a rival project....

[Lindy]

>The only solution may have to be the creation of a rival project....

The current project could be forked. either way the developer elves would have a ton of work ahead of them.

[Ug]

Its not good.

[Jman]

A little background info: some of XFree86 4.4 and later will have a new license (http://www.xfree86.org/legal/licenses.html) that allows for binary only distribution and so will be GNU GPL incompatible (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatIsCompatible).

I really hope it won't fork. One project is a lot easier to maintain.

[Lindy]

What I can't understand is the "why" of it all. They had to know that going to a binary only scheme would raise a big stink.
One thing that would fit would be.... <tinfoilhat> If there was some incentive in the form of $$$ from an outside influence *cough* MS *cough*. </tinfoilhat> But that seems just a bit too wild, so for now their logic excapes me.

[Avatraxiom]

How did they manage to change the license? Did they require copyright assignments (saying "XFree owns this code, not me") from every contributor?

If not, then the copyright problems for switching licenses are prohibitive. That is, anybody who contributed code who didn't agree to the license change would still have their code under the GPL, meaning that that code would have to be removed from XFree86...

IANAL (though I majored in Legal Studies).

-M

[ewdi]

i'm still not clear how they could change the license with contribs code in it, but they are sure changing direction

[Avatraxiom]

Ah, I see. It's just code owned by David Dawes that is under the new license.

I forsee many XFree-hackers being suddenly hired by Red Hat...