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

[Harold L Hunt II]

Sven Luther wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 01:06:23PM +0000, Andrew C Aitchison wrote:
> 
>>On Sat, 31 Jan 2004, Sven Luther wrote:
>>
>>
>>>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.
>>>
>>>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.
> 
> 
> This is not acceptable. You are making wild accusations, and didn't even
> try to contact the relevant people. To my knowledge, Petr is the sole
> author of matroxfb, and there should not have been any problem in at
> least asking him about this.

Wild accusations?  How do you get wild accusations from pointing out 
that there "may be 27 authors of the relevant file"?  If anyone is 
making wild accusations, it is you.  Andrew simply stated the point that 
this is not an issue about proving whether *one* file doesn't have 
issues; rather, it is the issue of having to prove that *all* files do 
not have issues, and many of these files may be just as messy in 
authorship as Andrew is suggesting.

Harold