On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 09:10:22AM +0000, Andrew C Aitchison wrote:

For several years the mga fb kernel driver has supported dual head and/or
dvi on cards which aren't supported by the XFree86 driver (unless you
use the mga_hal). I've wanted to use kernel code to add this support to 
XFree86, but been put off by the licence problem.

As I remember it, the pertinent register information here was reverse 
engineered, so it is at least arguable that I'd be copying fbdev
intellectual property here if I'd extracted and reused it.
Perhaps I was wrong, but my understanding from my days in a software
house taught me that I'd be breaking copyright not just by lifting
lines of code, but also by reading the code and copying intellectual
property, including register information.

Petr Vandrovec, the author of the vast majority of matroxfb code, has
repeatedly granted requests to re-use the code under X11 license.  Did
you even ask him?

-- 
Ryan Underwood, [off-list ref]