[forum] [XFree86] Announcement: Modification to the base XFree86(TM) license.

[Matthieu Herrb]

David Dawes wrote (in a message from Friday 13)
 > On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 09:27:59PM +0100, Matthieu Herrb wrote:
 > This begs a couple of questions that I have yet to see answered:
 > 
 >   1. If other third-party contributions are acknowledged in, say, a CD
 >      booklet, why shouldn't XFree86's be?

On this particular piece of paper, only the graphics designers are
acknoledged. The various licenses of other 3rd party contributions are
in the CD, either in the source tree or in the installed
documentation. (XFree86's license is installed as
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/doc/LICENSE for instance). 

 > 
 >   2. How did distributions that shipped Apache under its 1.1 licence,
 >      which is similar to the XFree86 1.1 licence, satisfy its
 >      similar requirements?  Was this ever an issue for OpenBSD?

Hmm, I didn't notice that the new XFree86 license uses the same words
as the 1.1 Apache license. OpenBSD has had long discussions with
Apache people about their license too...

But my main point point is not there (Maybe I should not have
mentionned the OpenBSD case), it is that I don't see the benefit of
changing the license. 

XFree86 should be freely redistribuable (including in binary only
products, which is why the GPL is not a solution) for any purpose, and
that we don't want people to lie and pretend that they wrote (or own)
the code that comes from the project. The existing XC/MIT license is
good for that. 

					Matthieu