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XFree86 Alters License
kinema writes "According to the XFree86 announcement starting with XFree86 v4.4.0-RC3 there will be a new license. There are some worries that these changes might be incompatible with the GPL." The FSF has a good page about the problems with BSD-style advertising clauses, which ironically uses XFree86's old license as an example of one to emulate.
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The requirement to add an acknowledgement (often called the "advertising clause") is something that's not present in the GPL. The GPL states that GPLed code may only be distributed if further requirements or restrictions above and beyond the GPL are not made. It's therefore impossible to satisfy the terms of both licenses simultaneously, and therefore the extra clause makes the new XFree license GPL incompatible.
Now, why's this a problem? The XFree project doesn't include GPLed code itself, so there are no concerns from that point of view. However, if any of the code in the X libraries falls under this new license, then the FSF's interpretation of the GPL means that you wouldn't be able to link any GPLed program against the X libraries and distribute it. That's fairly bad.
On the plus side, the freedesktop.org x libraries were branched from XFree before the license change - as a result, we can pretty much guarantee that there will be libraries available that can be used with GPLed code. The end result would probably be to reduce the amount of XFree code in a distribution, rather than to increase the credit that the XFree project wants. It's almost certainly a counter-productive move.
The BSD license, and the MIT license are both GPL compatible. In fact, most licenses more liberal than the GPL are compatible with it. Being GPL compatible simply means that you can include that code in GPL'ed code. For developers, having the X license be GPL-compatible is a good thing.
Of course, this issue brings up some schisms between the GPL and BSD communities. However, I find the attitude of the BSD proponents on this subject somewhat strange. By choosing the BSD license, you are giving people the right to do whatever they want with their work. This means that company could take your code and include it in a proprietory app, without releasing improvements back to the community. By their decision to license under BSD, developers indicate that they are okay with this. Why, then, should any of them get mad that other developers would include BSD code in GPL'ed programs? Is GPL worse than propietory???
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Can somebody explain why this new 1.1 license is necessarily incompatible with GPL2 / LGPL? True, it is an annoying licence change as the FSF article explains, and may not be a smart move for the project. But annoying doesn't make it incompatible. And no one even said (that I can determine) that original flawed BSD license was in fact incompatible; just undesirable.
In fact, this seems to be less restrictive than the GNU FDL license for documentation. It's not the same as past famous GPL-incompatible licenses, such as an old version of the Python license.
That being said, one would hope that the continued work on the next generation of GPL will consider whether or not "advertising clauses" will really result in GPL incompatibility. The mission of the FSF and the GPL is to make sure that the code can be freely used and reused. It's unclear how requiring positive attribution would interfere with that. Aren't there options for that sort of thing in FSF's Free Documentation License?
Admittedly, it's a slippery slope -- imagine a license with a clause requiring binaries be accompanied by a message advocating a particular political position. Or a particular sexual position, for that matter...
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Actually this is not really the case if you take GPL seriously. GPL is like a prion, anything it touches is meant to turn into itself. The whole objective of GPL is deliberately and explicitly to prevent commercial exploitation. If you think differently then you have never met RMS in person and listened to him for more than 30 minutes.
I used to share an office building with RMS. I think the only person who really takes RMS and the GPL seriously is Bill Gates. Bill does believe in IP rights and so he takes the GPL as RMS intends it to be read, not as most people read it.
Take the linked screed on the 'advertisement' clause. Not having an advertisement clause is the single biggest mistake we made with the Web. If libwww had had an advertisement clause Marc Andressen and NCSA could not have plagarised the work in the way they did, they would have had to tell people that the majority of the code in Mosaic had been written at CERN. With no advertisement clause there was no requirement to tell anyone about CERN and so until about 1995 almost every press report on the Web either did not mention Tim Berners-Lee and CERN at all or did so as an afterthought.
Meanwhile Marc Andressen created a huge PR machine at Netscape dedicated to promoting Marc as the lone inventor of the Web. The fact that Eric Bina not Marc really wrote Mosaic was also rewritten. Netscape even sponsored a book to promote this revisionist history - see Architects of the Web, not only is there no chapter on Tim, the only time he is mentioned is to attack him with lies.
So no, do not take RMS's advice he has only a slight connection with reality. RMS believes in a version of anti-corporativist activism that is considered fringe by the type of people who still believe that there is no difference between Al Gore and George Bush, and plan to vote for Ralph Nader in November.
So no, not being GPL compatible is not a bug, it is something very positive that should be applauded.
As for RMS's rant on the advertising clause, it would be very easy to write a C macro and some perl scripts that compile the relevant notice section automatically. BSD does not tell every user what it is the product of Berkley every time they start a shell script. If it writes anything to the console during boot well who reads that anyway? All you need is a single one line command to print out the list of contributors. Call it credits or something.
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Read the openssl license sometimes.
The author of that license seems to hold a deep grudge against the GPL, and specifically coded his license to make it incompatible (explicitly!!).
Anecdotally, it actually seems very common for BSD advocates to hate on the GPL. GPL users have no problem incorporating most BSD stuff with compatible licenses, because the product is GPL'd its not going to bother them.
The BSD crowd dont seem to be afraid that proprietary interests will advance the code such that the free version atrophies, but they do seem concerned that a rebadged GPL version could do just that: become the new "official" version. That would preclude any more commercial forking they had planned.
Personally, I thought the commercial fork pipe-dream was last used successfully by bill joy. I dont know why it still has so many adherents- proprietary is clearly not the wave of the future.
I don't see any moral difference between RMS insisting that you call the operating system "GNU/Linux" and the XFree86 people insisting they get credit for their work. (Technically I see a difference, as there's nothing forcing you to call it GNU/Linux. But morally it's the same thing.)