Re: Re: [forum] Re: Announcement: Modification to the base XFree86(TM) license.

On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 01:06:23PM +0000, Andrew C Aitchison wrote:

quoted

And, have you asked the mgafb driver author about this ?

You can hardly complain about lack of back traffic if you didn't ask him
about it, and if you did, it would be interesting to this discussion to
know what the problems where.

"The Author" ?
This is open source code; there may be 27 authors of the relevant file.
In XFree86 code I wouldn't know how to find the author of a file without
looking at that file. My {limited ,mis}understanding of clean room coding 
makes me wary of reading any source unless I know that its licence will 
allow me to do what I wish.

The only authors that legally matter are the ones listed in the
copyright notices.  There are three copyright notices in the matroxfb
stuff: one is Petr, another is Gerd Knorr and the other is Matrox.  I'm
sure Petr has a pretty clear idea what he wrote, and I doubt Gerd would
get an attitude with you either over anything he did.  Since you haven't
even inquired about it, you don't have much to complain about as I see
it.

OK. So I've probably been paranoid and lazy, but if the fbdev licence 
had been compatible with the XFree86 one, I would have done the work.
As it is the bar was raised high enough to stop me.

Or maybe the license incompatibility was simply a convenient way to cop
out of doing some work?

quoted

quoted

So, for one developer at least, the reason there has been no traffic
from fbdev to XFree86 is *directly* because of the licence issue.

You can't copy and paste code.  You _can_ rewrite code.  Hardware
interfaces, trivial routines, and problems for which there exist only one
or a few obvious ways of solving them are all examples of where
copyright does not apply.  Porting any code from fbdev to a XFree86
driver *will* involve substantial rewriting.  I know this because I'm
currently doing it for the mga driver.

quoted

Yeah, but again, was it so because of a definite will on the fbdev
authors part, or because you didn't ask him ?

Isn't the aim of open source licences is to allow people to use the code
without tracking down the author and obtaining permission ?

No.  The aim of open source licenses is to allow people to use the code
_under the terms the author chose_ without tracking down the author and
obtaining extra permissions.

I can do that with closed source.

I don't see how you have greater freedom with closed source licenses,
but feel free to elaborate.

-- 
Ryan Underwood, [off-list ref]