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Mandrake Blocked By XFree86 4.4 License
Linzer writes "A mailing-list message posted by Mandrake Linux's main developer on the Cooker mailing-list states that the development version of the distro is about to revert from XFree86 4.4 to the 4.3 version because of XFree86's recent license change. Mandrake contributors have started asking for justifications from MdkSoft. Many point out features of XF86 4.4 [an 'an open source X11-based desktop infrastructure'] they can't live without, including support for some not so uncommon hardware.
A later Cooker mailing-list post extends a bit on the reasons."
Its nice to see the XFree86.org folks making the transition to the freedesktop.org smoother by making themselves irrelevent to users. Nice going guys!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Note: I don't actually speak for RMS, but I am reminded of his doctrine every time someone says "I need this non-free software". ;^)
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
...to XFree86 but I don't see them making any new friends by doing this kind of thing. As soon as
alternatives are more mature, XFree86 will feel the heat.
And as for the Free in XFree86... Hmm..
But in the last several years it really just hasn't moved.
18 years ago the Mac // came out. We stole a vid card from one and put it in another. 4 seconds later, we had 2 screens showing one continuous desktop. Windows and X Windows finally now can do that if you kill a chicken at the full moon.
The X Consortium kept X down for critical years - backing off from coming close to dictating look at feel. As a result, doing things like Exiting an App was a Tower of Babel proposition (frame != lotus != xv != wordperfect != anything else).
Gnome and KDE was developed by folks used to Windows and Mac as kids who demanded a style guide. Too late?
X11R6/Broadway was released and, as far as I can discern, mostly development has stopped. Sure we have drivers to take advantage of cards and 3D engines and such, but it's pretty well unchanged from 1994.
Where is my easy Log Back in and have it give me my desktop I left back (start up the apps I had with cursors in the places I had them)?
Where is my ability to snapshot and env, give up the machine, move to another and restart it?
What's moved FORWARD except drivers in the last couple years?
Why do we care about .. releases.
License?
I have faith that it will be worked out with everyone happy. This reminds me too much of the IPF flameup over a license in a beta of darren's code. It caused PF to be written, but that was mostly schoolyard maturity at work on that one.
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Actually, in case you hadn't noticed, these are the Glory Days of X, man. I don't consider that era when you had to worry about 8 bit color palette collisions to be anything like a time of glory. TrueColor displays, KDE, Gnome, XRender, Xft.. these are some of the ingredients of a glorious new age for X. Happily, Keith and Jim are still involved.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
There is a no advertising without written permission clause.
/usr/share/doc/XFree86 or whatever you'd be in compliance.
I don't get that out of the license at all. What I read is that you can't use the name "The XFree86 Project, Inc." in any advertising -- why is that a big deal?
I also don't see the problems with the rest of the license points highlighted in the mailing list exchange. Looks like if you put their copyright notice in
Now the generation of yet another licensing scheme for open source software does confuse things unnecessarily, but I don't see any concrete problems with the license....
IMHO it's the BSDish license that will eventually lead to such a bizzare tangle of required credits, attributions, acknowledgements, etc that it'll be very hard to keep track of them all.
I'm glad I use the *GPL's. Pretty much avoid mess's like this altogether too.
People are saying this license change is "incompatible" with the GPL... however under the wording of the change it is still acceptable for individual files to be copyrighted, and included in the XFree86 base as licensed under the GPL. You're really RMSing if you are going to noodle about having to include an extra copyright notice in your documentation.
This has little to do with anything other than the fact that Mandrake team realizes it's not a valuble use of their time to go through adding all these new copyright notices when you're in RC1 state. Not sure how it compares with rolling back to 4.3 in terms of actual labor, but obviously the CBA came out on the side of rollback.
The biggest joke here is that people are crying about losing the features of 4.4, in a distribution that doesn't do anything to stop you from DOWNLOADING AND INSTALLING THE BLEEDING EDGE FROM SOURCE whenever you feel like it. for crying out loud, people. DIY!
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
so you want them to list 1000 plus people on the box? and the ads? and the site? Cost prohibitive.
Why can't they just post a link to the XFree86 website? the people who care will go there, those that don't care won't have to wade through a bunch of names they don't care about.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I dont see whats the big deal, issues like this can create new tech, and spark new creative ideas in the community.
Why? Just because the XFree86 people decided to make their license terms incompatible doesn't mean that we can't use their older versions. Heck, we can even fork their last good version. That's the _entire_ point of using open source. Had XFree86 been propriatary, we'd be screwed in this case, but now it's just an inconvenience.
I am so glad that I use the *BSD's. Pretty much avoid mess's like this altogether.
,etc....
Except the new X licensed would seem to me to make linking X librarys into GPL'd code a violation of the GPL, as well as adding the onus of the advertising clause to EVERY SINGLE PROGRAM that uses the X libraries.
If you're fine with loosing all of the GPL'd apps that you run on your *BSD box, then enjoy your Xwindows with no modern window manager, no GNOME or KDE, no QT or GTK apps, etc
Please send all UCE to scally@devolution.com so I can f
Rubbish. It's very clear that isn't the case - applications (or, for that matter, libraries) that run on top of X but do not require a particular flavour of X to work are not considered derivative works. If they were, you couldn't run GPLed programs on any proprietary X server including MacOS, various commercial UNIXes, the commercial X servers that are available for Linux, etc. etc.
You could conceivably argue that a program was derivative if it required a feature present in XFree and only in XFree, but (certainly OTOH) I can't think of any such programs.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Well I guess this is the first step at digging Xfree86's grave, isn't it? Distros will stop shipping it, people will stop using it, what's left of the developers at xfree86.org will lose interest in developing it and the whole project will head towards a slow death.
It's a bit early to draw conclusions but if all the distros will drop it one by one, it's just what will happen. I'll theink we'll be better off with the alternatives (Xouvert & the X server at freedesktop.org) anyway.
I'm not going to run it. Everyone who writes software has a right to decide on their own licence, but everyone also has a right to choose not to use it.
Imagine I had an OS program that required you to list 1,000 contributors each time it was run, divided by group, sorted alphabetically, blah blah blah. Now you're required to fill a user's screen with 1,000 names they'll never read, and you are unable to get around this requirement, short of writing your own program from scratch. What a waste of previously good OS code.
Imagine that you had actually taken the time to read the revised license for yourself rather than rely on others. Here then for the incredibly lazy are points 2 and 3 of the revised license:
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution, and in the same place and form as other copyright, license and disclaimer information.
3. The end-user documentation included with the redistribution, if any, must include the following acknowledgment: "This product includes software developed by The XFree86 Project, Inc (http://www.xfree86.org/) and its contributors", in the same place and form as other third-party acknowledgments. Alternately, this acknowledgment may appear in the software itself, in the same form and location as other such third-party acknowledgments.
Nowhere in those statements are you required to post a damn thing on the screen as part of the binary. Note the repeated use of the words "documentation" as the basis for satisfying the conditions of the license. Give credit for using their code or don't use (steal?) their source to make your own app. These are the conditions for use. Disagree, fine. But don't distort the truth to make your argument sound better.
I'm still waiting for someone to provide a reasoned explanation for all this chest beating and general blather. As per usual, there's far to many instances of I-can't-be-bothered-to-RTFM and "the sky is falling".
At the very least, the ongoing Debian packaging of 4.3 is apparently partially delayed by efforst to keep things prepared for a switch to the freedesktop.org stuff, so at least one major player already has a framework in place to ditch xfree86.
You raise an excellent point, but we have to remember that any new implementation of X11 is going to have to allow all the existing drivers to work with it. Otherwise we face a lot of things like this: "Uh, hello, NVidia? Remember how we whined to you to make drivers for XFree86? Well forget that, now we need you to do it all over again for this new implementation."
Yes, in the perfect world, all graphic card specs would be open and anyone could write a driver for them. But it is not likely going to happen anytime soon, and to abandon all the work that companies who have not opened the specs but have graciously chosen to give us drivers is throwing the baby out with the bathwater (and I'm not implying that you're saying this, but it is something that might follow from an attempt to rewrite everything from scratch).
I am aware that this attitude flies in the face of free software purists. Much as I respect RMS and his position, I prefer to meet somewhere in the middle.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Noone else is demanding recognition for their work. They're a part of the global community and have accepted the terms. It all works nicely.
But that's not what stuns me the most about your post. It's your way of thinking - HOW, i say, HOW on earth could X be more important than Linux to Linux? There is a reason that Mandrake is Linux, not just because IT IS BASED on the Linux kernel in the way it works as of today, but also because this is the way one use and contribute to the GPL community. And it's named Mandrake Linux. That's why it's sold, downloaded and used. Jesus.
In the end, X is nothing without what's on top. Which is a lot of GPL. If GPL distributors refuse to use XFree4.4, but only distribute GPL compatible software, someone would have to create everything BUT X. With X licensing. Great.
There always seem to be people on Slashdot who ask why so much work is "wasted" on two projects to solve the same problem. The most notable example is KDE vs. Gnome. Well, I think this is a perfect example of why that's a great thing. The XFree guys haven't had serious competition in years and now we're all begging for the freedesktop.org guys to come to the rescue. All of the "wasted" effort does have a purpose, it keeps people from trying these kinds of shenanigans.
"I think the U.N. is going to find that the blame lies with all the Sudanese rap music that glamorizes genocide."
And that's just for XFree86 alone. Imagine the precedent this sets for other software projects - if everybody had these kinds of clauses, imagine the printed manuals shipped with a boxed Linux distribution? Ugh. This is why everybody stopped using the original BSD license, it became clear that for sufficient numbers of dependencies and contributors to projects each separately licensing their copyrighted code, the overall results is an unmanageable mess. Thus people adopted the modified BSD license, and Berkeley finally relicensed (all/most) of their old BSD-licensed code under the new modified terms in 1999, and everybody rejoiced.
XFree86 seems to be trying to throwback to something similarly annoying, though perhaps slightly diluted. Given that the community as a whole has rejected these "advertising clauses" soundly, it's just a complete rejection of the concept of playing nice to go and add it back in to a high profile project like XFree86 to address some imagined wrong.
Why bother forking 4.3.x, when you can fork 4.4.0 RC2?
From xfree86.org (emphasis added): "The XFree86 Project, Inc is announcing that it has made a change to its license effective with the Third Release Candidate for the 4.4.0 series."
Did somebody say loophole?
What were these guys thinking when they resurrected an advertising clause?
Hey, let's not just shoot ourselves in the foot, but do it just when desktop Linux is taking off?
Yeah, that's what we needed, a licensing dispute when we're trying to develop more user-friendly desktop environments.
Pity the alternatives aren't further along. On the other hand, maybe actions like this, basically boycotting 4.4, will get them to revert back to the old license, or at least get rid of the advertising clause.
Those people from XFree got fed up with the X server not being noticed by anyone. Linux this, linux that, you know, the SCO stuff giving Linux publicity, but nobody says anything about X. Not a word. And they got fed up with this. Like RMS who always was crying loud: NOT LINUX, GNU/Linux. Because Linux is not Linux. It is at least GNU/Linux/XFree/BSD-stuff/something-else.
You can defy gravity... for a short time