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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
As far as I can tell, all Mandrake would need to do is include the new text in with the rest of the copyright/liscense info and they'd be in compliance? Why is this a big deal? Or is there some subtle legal thing at work?
It appears to my uneducated eye that this is a very slight modification which shouldn't make any difference to mandrake beyond the typical publication of copyright notices.
If Mandrake takes it seriously enough to revert to 4.3 I must be wrong? Anyone have an explanation?
Yes, I know, XFree was, and still is, THE X11 free implementation for a Linux graphical subsystem. YES, it is by far one of the most advanced overall. But NO, there is NOT only this one.
This implementation is the one we've been using for Linux Ages. But since recently, they have failed to deliver a greater-than-the-previous product: no extraordinary boosts, no rewrite of the starting system, etc... It's beginning to grow too old - we can see that by the starting greed of the project over its programmers.
What we need is a new subsystem, like Xouvert or freedesktop.org's X Server implementation.
This is my opinion. Everyone has a right to my opinion.
Wouldn't a good solution to be what Mozilla did to ensure GPL compatibility? Cross-license XF86 under its own liberal license, the GPL, and the LGPL. This way, companies like mandrake could easily use it under an "approved" license, hassle free. -- What to keep away from dogs
Laymans terms, probably misunderstood:
They have an incredible mishmash of licenses between each source file, as each file can contain a message stating what license it is released under.
Theyve just created another which encompasses the binary distribution.
The whole binary distribution.
Except the portions which had seperate licenses as specified by the source code.
But to check which those bits are, you would have to check each source file, and know what it does.
So I guess Mandrake have decided, probably in these exact words "F*CK THAT!"
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
...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.
You can read his analysis on a thread on debian-legal.
There's also been extensive discussion of the new license on debian-legal. The discussion carries over from Jan into February too.
But how is this license change is big problem?
#Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions, and the following disclaimer.
# 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.
# 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.
From the looks of the problematic clauses, it seems that all that needs to be changed is some documentation.
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
Debian is expected to run into this problem in 2038. Way to go Branden.
The short version: the GPL is "incompatible" with licenses that require you to include extra text and restrict all other advertising. Thus, you cannot legally include both GPL'ed code and New XFree86 licensed code in the same program.
Trustworthy sources tell me that Red Hat, SuSE, and Debian are reacting similarly. The license change was announced as a fait accompli, and after being urged to reconsider, David Dawes went ahead with it any way.
This might be the sort of thing the freedesktop.org people are talking about when they say XFree86 (the project) doesn't have any accountability to the community. They seem to have a problem working cooperatively with others.
Freedesktop.org not only has a couple of big-name figures from the glory days of X involved (Jim Gettys and Keith Packard), but they also have actively involved various third parties and stakeholders in the X Window System technology -- not just the Linux distributions, but leading developers in GNOME, KDE, and Mozilla to name just a few, and some other people who were kicked out of the XFree86 project.
XFree86 does not seem to have been able to make the transition from the small hobbyist audience that it served in 1993. Maybe David Dawes and the few remaining participants in XFree86 will be happier producing a custom version of the X Window System for themselves and a tiny minority of others. Maybe they didn't lack the skills to be a large community project: just the motivation.
I think Stallman would remind he foresaw this situation many years ago:
The X Windows Trap
If people like you weren't so busy misrepresenting his views you'd see that.
an ill wind that blows no good
First, XFree is an open source, community driven project. Hence, in many distributors eyes is wasn't merely "someone else's graphic system". The real problem was that all of these distributors assumed that XFree would remain GPL-compatible forever. In fact, many of the distributors contributed to the XFree project (see above). Beyond that, XFree was and is the standard, so it was only natural to use it.
XFree's sudden change to their license was a suprise that many people never saw coming.
It's *written* consent from all authors. It's just like the old BSD license when it had the advertising license where you had to list all contributors of a project if you advertised the software. Meaning if you had 1000 developers for a project that would easily fill an entire page in a magazine. Making the 20k dollars you just spent on a magazine ad a big list of names no one cares about. XFree86 has done this now too and made it a little bit worse too.
75% of all statistics are made up!
I find this paragraph specially interesting:
If you notice the defensive post by Alan Cox that he's asking them not to
change the license on his contributions, there's something wrong with it in
the sense that it doesn't appear as "free" software anymore (free as in
libre). (Not that they could, since Alan owns what he wrote of course)
This kind of action only adds to the licensing mess xfree86 currently is. Working with the xfree86 devlopment team is becoming harder and harder.
I can see why some mandrake users are pissed about this, but in the end it'll be better for everyone.
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
freedesktop.org already has replacements for pretty much everything in xfree86. The new license change has just sped up the need for it to work now. They recently released their new xlibs, and Keith Packard is still working on a replacement xserver. The only major problem left is that since the new xserver is a redesign it will need new binary drivers from ati/nvidia.
http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/xserver
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.
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.
Can someone give me a rational explanation as to why the GPL is so problematic in this area?
Sure. Because by requiring your program to list contributors, you're limiting the ability to use or modify the program as you see fit.
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.
It wont be for long. I assume from the discussions on debian-legal and the fact that debian is still chewing on xfree86 4.3, xfree86 4.4 wont ever be packaged for debian.
In my opinion this is a bigger problem for xfree86 than it is for debian. The reason being quite simple. By the time debian is ready for a new version of X11 the fdo xserver will be ready.
Where xfree86 is losing big is that debian is the one that does all the porting to non-i386 and to a degree non-ppc archs. Xfree86 is losing this service because debian will most likely not be packaging version 4.4 and that will result in xfree86 going down hill because debian along with many other developers that are outside xfree86 proper do a lot for xfree86.
Basically what Im saying is that the fdo xserver just got a huge boost in that there will be a lot of former xfree86 developers looking for a new project and as someone who activly uses the fdo xserver, it seems to be the best.
"We Don't Need No Truthless Heros!" - Project 86
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.
From: Theo de Raadt
Like other projects, we will not be incorporating new code from David
Dawes into the XFree86 codebase used in OpenBSD. All such changes
have to be skipped, rewritten, or you can contact the XFree86 group
and place your own efforts to repair this damage.
the message continues.. but I think you get the point. Check the mailing list archives for the entire message
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."
From the analysis I've seen in Debian lists, the new license wouldn't really be a problem if it just applied to the Xserver. The problem comes with the X client libraries (xlib and friends) that have to be linked with GPL (and other, the GPL is not the only problem here) programs.
Now, when it comes to the users, most of the new features they want have to do with hardware support, which is an Xserver feature. So it's possible that, as an interim solution, systems could be shipped with the new, ugly-licensed Xserver, but with older-but-sanely-licensed xlibs. This would seem to address everyone's issues fairly well.
I've always felt it was a bit of a mistake to have the client-side and server-side of XFree86 tied together anyway. They are pretty much independent, and I think it might make the most sense for XFree86 to abandon the client side, and just focus on making Xservers, while Freedesktop could ignore the server side (at least for now) and focus on the client libraries. Would make both parties jobs easier.
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?