On Mon, 1 Mar 2004, Marc Recht wrote:

> > As far as I've heared, the only thing added was the advertisement clause
> > ("If you use our product, please say so in docs etc.").
>
> So, it's some kind of BSD style license?
>
> > I think one can hardly deny that to someone whose work you use, and refuse
> > to give them the credits where they are due.
>
> I agree everyone has the right to put his/her work under the license he/she
> likes.
>
> The only thing I'd like to see is that we carefully revise the new license.
> I doubt that Debian/OpenBSD (and the others) would reject the inclusion of
> XF4.4 if it has a sort-of a BSD license. Better to invest some time in
> analysing the license before the import than having the problems
> afterwards. If everything turns out to be OK then that's fine if it not
> then we IMHO saved us worries and work... Better safe than sorry.

Nonetheless, they have. The only non-BSD thing about the license
is that you have to include the license in the binary distribution,
which we already do (in "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/doc/LICENSE"), so there's
evidently no problem.

The manufactured "controversy" looks like a weak excuse to chip at
XFree86 by the new upstarts, freedesktop.org and (the new) X.org. If
those teams truly believe, as they say, that they are taking up the
vanguard of X development, then they shouldn't care what XFree86 does
(with their "dead fork").

GNU Public License incompatibility is not our problem. The GPL, by
the way, may turn out to be as indefensible as many thought it was
all along. Take note the mud that the MPlayer group is stirring up.
Peter Wilmar Christensen, while denying the specific allegations,
essentially maintains that certain provisions of the GPL void the
entire thing:

    We have confirmed what we already knew, that when using code
    licensed under the GPL then we have to publish any derivative
    work.  This means that the legal foundation is very thin and
    there is no place in the world that I know of where the GPL
    has been tested in court.  So from a business perspective I
    would say that the license is relatively weak.

The entire interview is reproduced here:

    http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design6/news.html

In particular, though, it wouldn't serve our interests at all if
freedesktop's goal of having the X reference sources GPL'd is met,
so I submit we should side with XFree86, at least until the code
bases have diverged enough to make a decision on a technical basis.

Frederick