[forum] GPL-incompatible license

[Richard Stallman]

    XFree86 contains code from many sources and contributors, and under a
    range of licences with many copyright holders.  There has never been
    a single _specific_ licence covering everything.

Thank you, I stand corrected.

    The general preference has been for licences like the BSD and MIT
    licences.  By BSD, I mean the original BSD licence in common use when
    XFree86 began.

The original BSD license is incompatible with the GNU GPL.  I worked
for a couple of years to convince Berkeley to switch the BSD source
code to the revised BSD license.  I hope we can avoid bringing back
that sort of "advertising clause".  Its problems are cumulative at the
level of the whole system, and thus rather severe.  (Also, it is
incompatible with the GPL.)

Are there any files in Xlib that are covered by the original BSD
license?

    So, I am surprised to hear that you were not aware of this, especially
    since the FSF web site's "Various Licenses and Comments about Them" page
    <http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html#OriginalBSD> links to
    the online copy of the XFree86 3.3.6 COPYRIGHT document

Alas, I'm only human, and I can't keep up with all the work that would
be useful for me to do.  I remember noticing that link at one point,
and thinking "that's an unusual place to find the original BSD
license", but never thought of reading the page it pointed to.  Being
in a hurry, as always, I just moved on to the next task I had to do.
Of course, I forgot all about it until just now.

It looks now I had better fetch and read that page.

    I could see a potential case for arguing that our library licensing
    policy be tightened, i.e. become more restrictive in what licences it
    will accept, and reduce the licensing choices available to contributors
    to XFree86 libraries.

If that eliminates the GPL-incompatible licenses from Xlib, it would
eliminate the incompatibility with applications.  There might still
be incompatibilities with GPL-covered software that people might want
to use with the X server in various ways.  Freetype does not cause
a problem because its dual license provides GPL compatibility.  So it
becomes a significant question which other GPL-incompatible licenses
are really used, and where.