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

[mark kandianis]

On Sun, 1 Feb 2004 16:33:35 -0600, Ryan Underwood 
<nemesis-lists@icequake.net> wrote:

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

yeah but the point is _right now_ that porting from xfree86 to fbdev
is a simple slam dunk  and andrew is objecting that one-way
street, which btw your example supports.  you seem to be messing with 
metaphors.

peace and brotherhood,

mark.