Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Cygwin/XFree86 Leaving XFree86.org

Posted by simoniker on from the oh-the-shenanigans dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Cygwin/XFree86 project is leaving XFree86.org. For those that don't know, Cygwin/XFree86 is a port of the X Window System to Cygwin (which provides a *nix-like API on Windows). Here is the announcement and the start of the trouble. The XFree86 project has pushed away more developers than most projects ever have - is this the beginning of the end for XFree86?"

3 of 446 comments (clear)

  1. "is this the beginning of the end for XFree86?" by kfg · · Score: 0, Troll

    No.

    KFG

  2. You think that's bad... by gregarican · · Score: 0, Troll

    I tell you, *BSD is really dying. Soon they will join forces with a networking company to pull each other down into the tarpits too. I can see it down *BSD and Banyan. Building a better tomorrow...today.

  3. Maybe the real motivation is license zealotry. by Brett+Glass · · Score: 1, Troll
    The Sourceforge page for the forked project says, right up front, that the licensing is the "GNU General Public License (GPL)" (first!) followed by the "MIT License" (last), even though all of XFree86 is licensed under the MIT license.

    It is well known that Cygnus (whose name was chosen because it has "GNU" in the middle) eats, lives, sleeps and breathes the GPL. Is this the real reason they forked the project? It's interesting: The GPL "faithful" claim that forking is a bad thing and that their license prevents it (a claim which has never been demonstrated to be true), yet they certainly seem to have no compunctions about forking a project to bring it under the GPL!