Re: X.Org Foundation - Release Call - 3rd May 2004

Branden Robinson writes:
 > On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 04:43:57PM +0100, Howard Greenwell wrote:
 > > 3. Contents of next release/schedule.
 > > 
 > > Alan Hourihane has been updating the XFree86 tree? Jim asked if anyone
 > > knows the status.  Tungsten Graphics contracts require people to
 > > integrate their work on the XFree86 tree.  Need to investigate changes
 > > that have been made.

Things get way too political here. I'm sure that those vendors who 
have drivers developed for their HW have no interest at all to get 
involved in politics. Their interest is tho make sure their drivers 
are widely deployed.
Therefore it would be appropriate to get in touch with them. I assume
they would not mind if X.Org also shipped the drivers.

 > 
 > I have a few questions:
 > 
 > 1) Does Alan have a policy regarding the license of the contributions he
 >    makes to the XFree86 CVS repository?

Why don't you ask Alan yourself instead of posting a semi-rethoric 
question here?

 > 2) Does Alan use the XFree86 1.1 or X-Oz licenses?

Have you seen any indication that he does?

 > 3) Does anything in the Tungsten Graphics contract forbid people from
 >    integrating their work into other trees as well?

?!? .....

 > statements by David Dawes[1][2][3].  (Whether such statements can
 > reasonably be interpreted to have retroactive effect is quite open to
 > debate, but I've personally had zero luck getting answers to concrete
 > questions from XFree86 regarding the licensing situation.)


Brandon, unless you have some evidence that the X.Org tree contains
code that is under the XFree86 1.1 licenses you should not bring this
up.
When the tree was set up it was made sure there are no such 'contaminations'.

To avoid any further debate over the issue of such 'implicite licensing'
I've turned off the automatic import of the XFree86 tree into a vendor 
branch of the X.Org tree since those statements were made.

We really don't need to go down this avenue.

 > 
 > Let me also take this opportunity to pimp my "sanitized" XFree86
 > snapshot[4][5] as a resource for anyone who may find it useful.  It is
 > XFree86 CVS as of 2004-02-12 (a day when there were no commits, and the
 > day before the XFree86 1.1 license was imposed), with all files affected
 > by the X-Oz license deleted or dialed back to the revisions immediately
 > prior to that commit.  This tree should therefore be free of any of the
 > problematic X-Oz or XFree86 1.1 license clauses.  Please note, however,
 > that it doesn't "sanitize" the tree of anything else (e.g., Debian finds

The tree is already in a sanitized state. There is no need to start this
debate. 

 > some fonts and documentation to have licenses which fail the DFSG, but
 > that's not really germane to this particular task -- in any case, some
 > folks don't give two hoots about the DFSG).
 > 
 > What I'd *really* like to be able to offer is a proper copy of the
 > XFree86 CVS repo, filtered as above, but I haven't had time to prepare
 > such a thing yet. 

I think we are already far beyond this stage.

Something that should be done is to identify useful patches that went 
into XFree86 and contact the contributor to ask for permission to put 
them into the X.Org tree also.
Most people probably won't mind. 


Egbert.