[vox-tech] XFree86 4.4.0 non-GPL compatible

[Mike Simons]

On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 11:33:03AM -0800, Robert G. Scofield wrote:
> On Monday 01 March 2004 06:28, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> > the fact of the matter is, nobody was really happy with xfree86 before
> > this happened.  they were extremely slow, secretive, and seemingly
> > rejected patches in a passive-aggresive way (the cygwin xfree86 issue).
> > it's just that they haven't been viewed as "evil" up until now.  many
> > forks have been started, and they've all stalled.
> 
> I don't understand the big picture.  How can the XFree project get away with 
> upsetting so many people?  If Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake, SuSe, OpenBSD, etc. 
> get upset and start looking for alternatives, where does that leave the XFree 
> project?  Why is it not the case the XFree project needs to depend on making 
> everyone happy?

On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 12:05:12PM -0800, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> But, noone's stopping them from living in their 'own little world,'
> while everyone else moves on with a forked version.

On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 07:30:03PM -0800, Mark K. Kim wrote:
> 1. There are too many X-based programs to simply "switch over" to another
>    GUI platform.

Mark,

  As Bill pointed out, the upset people just have to take the 4.4.0rc2
source base (which was the last one with the old license), and make 
a fork... pickup from that point is very simple compared to coming up
with a new graphic infrastructure standard.

Bob,

  I am a little confused about what was in the minds of whoever decided
to do this... it seems like there wasn't much public discussion.  They
also do not seem to be backing off very quickly.

  It seems the X11 client libraries are exempted from this license change,
but it's unclear if this includes everything that could be a problem.

Pete,

  I hope a fork of X would do wonders, like EGCS fork did for gcc...
but with that said the old X11 has made some pretty impressive changes 
in the last 3 years.