XFree86 4.4 Released

puriots0 writes "XFree86 version 4.4 is finally out! Grab it while it's still hot, if you don't mind the recent licensing changes... And if you don't care about the license, but the maintainers of your distribution do, this might be the only way to get it for the moment." The XFree86 people seem very eager to claim that the new license is nothing bad; see their FAQ. However, people who have reviewed it, such as RMS and Branden Robinson, think differently. It looks as if the XFree86 people have a short timespan to either rethink their license changes or be dropped from every/almost every Linux distribution in favor of a forked codebase.

Comments

FP!

[Anonymous Coward]

FP!

-sw

Licensing

[Rick Zeman]

These licensing problems and forks will turn out to be the downfall of Linux.

Re:Licensing

[MooKore 2004]

Its not just linux, the BSDs are against these changes too. Ironicly too, since their licence used to be like this one.

Re:Licensing

[pe1rxq]

No, in a little while they will prove that nomatter what companies/organizations do it will continue fine without them....
The great thing about free software is that you can only be in control as long as you don't piss off a critical set of developpers.

Jeroen

Re:Licensing

[Technonotice_Dom]

Divide and conquer...

We're fighting ourselves on this issue. Not until this licensing problem is sorted out will big companies be able to take deploying Linux based desktop machines seriously...

Re:Licensing

[m_c0upe]

that's not cliche at all, very insightful. what downfall are you talking about? linux ix great for those who like it, it has no commercial aspirations. maybe its the downfall of commercial linux, but who the hell cares, i'll always be able to go put together a distro if i want too. there will never be a 'downfall'. the world isn't all corporate, and linux certainly isn't.

Re:Licensing

[msh104]

no, this is a good move from the distro side. x11 needs to be gpl compatible. it is madness to rewrite all the progs using it. I really hope freedesktop shows there head in this round. they truly have a great potential.

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

But you're always dependent on the developers.

What happens if the developers just stop developing? what if they get bored, or get a super-duper job offer that takes them away from being stewards of their open source workds?

Open Source will not work. Any rational person can see that. This is why I refuse to work in that arena, or involve myself with anything that is related to open source.

Re:Licensing

[ISayWeOnlyToBePolite]

Are you trying to be funny with that firefox sig.? lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/debian-devel-20 0402/msg01877.html I'm not laughing.

Re:Licensing

[Nothinman]

No, it's an advantage. If MS suddenly changed the MSHTML license that said it couldn't be used by free programs what would happen? The only choice would be to get a new HTML renderer like Gecko, because XFree is open source we can take the code that is still under the free license and fork a new copy under a free license.

Re:Licensing

[pe1rxq]

What happens when closed source developpers stop developping? What if they get another job?
If the company doesn't wan't to develop anymore your screwed, otherwise they would have to hire new programmers....

The free software alternative is better:
No matter what the original author does, you can always do (or have done) it yourself. And that is just asuming you are the only one that cares.
If the project is really interesting someone will eventually pick it up or replace it.

A rational person that doesn't see that is blind.

Jeroen

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Changed to Icerabbit, as suggested by debian.

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Closed source programs are typically backed by the company selling the product. This is not the case for open source products.

Again, this is why I won't trust anything outside of a dumb router to open source software. Anyone doing anything else other is a stuipd idiot.

Re:Licensing

[GimmeFuel]

But you're always dependent on the developers.

You're always dependent on some developers, not necessarily the same developers as you've always had.

What happens if the developers just stop developing?

What happens if the developers just stop developing a closed-source product?

With an abandoned closed-source product, you've got nothing to do except look for an alternative, use the old version, or write one yourself from scratch.

With an abandoned open-source product, you can get new devs on your team, or the code can be forked. No open source project is truly abandoned if there is continued interest in developing it.

Re:Licensing

[pe1rxq]

And not having the need for this backing is the great thing. The moment this backing dissapears for a closed source program you have no option what so ever. If that happens to an open source program than you can still use it, make legal copies of it and can even improve it.

You see software as a product, you should regard is as infrastructure. Somehow a society manages to build and support a road system.... and its not by magic.
When the original builder is gone you can still use the road, and if you don't know how to fill a hole you get somebody to do it for you. And if you are really lucky you will get some community of road users to do it collectivly (something like a government perhaps?)

Jeroen

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironicly too, since their [BSD] licence used to be like this one.

It seems that experience is a good teacher after all...

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

How many succesful closed sourced projects can you think of that got closed down and are now unusable?

Re:Licensing

[(H)elix1]

These licensing problems and forks will turn out to be the downfall of Linux.

I'd call forking natural selection... and while it can be painful, I would say it makes things stronger. Projects that head out into the weeds loose mind share (developers, users, 'buzz' if you will..) and disappear. The beauty of Linux is you get to scratch your itch. Often others share the same problem, and may share a solution. Someone running the project goes off into a wild tangent, good for them. Might be a little pain as you switch to something that is more aligned to what you were after, but odds are you can.

A personal example? I let myself get lulled into the RPM package management and really felt like I got the shaft when RH dropped the 'non-enterprise' user who did not have mad cash for per machine/per year subscriptions. All the packaged distros seemed to share the same Achilles heel (in my mind). Hunkered down and went Gentoo rather than putting energy into Fedora. If ebuilds fade away, I'll look at the app-get thing...

Forking thins the hurd (-1, terrible joke)

Re:Licensing

[pe1rxq]

How many succesfull open source projects that are now unusable can you name?

Jeroen

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to get defensive, I just think it's a bit of a myth that closed source project are any more/less likely than open source projects to whither and die if they are succesful. It is in a the company's interests to continue to improve a succesful project, to continue the company's success, and for an open source project, the more succesful it is the more likely people will be willing to contribute to it.

Indeed, an unsuccesful closed source project will no longer receive support, because, well, it was unsuccesful for whatever reason. And in the unsuccesful open source path, the project will probably die due to the lack of interest in it.

In both cases market forces will determine the lifetime of the project.

Re:Licensing

[pe1rxq]

There is a difference... For a closed source project there is a much higher critical number. Namely the point between profit and loss. You need a certain critical mass to support a closed source program and its backing company.

Even if you are the only one using a open source program you can continue to use and improve it as long as you like. The critical mass here is one.

Jeroen

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair enough, my argument was reliant on the fact that there would be a number of people who would be left in the lurch, as it were, if the project were to die(hence the emphasis on succesful). I felt this was a fair relection of the intention of a piece of closed source software(i.e to sell as many copies as they can), if they are not doing it for this reason, they I see no point in the project being released as closed source.

Re:Licensing

[hughesjr]

Dbase III Oracle 7 MS DOS Office 97 Lotus 123 Windows NT Windows 95 MS DOS 6.22

Re:Licensing

[tigga]

Its not just linux, the BSDs are against these changes too. Ironicly too, since their licence used to be like this one.

Is it true? I know about Theo being picky, but FreeBSD and NetBSD folks seem to be indifferent..

Re:Licensing

[justsomebody]

I'll exclude bigger projects to paint you clearer picture...

Most of the companies that produce Accouting software are large enough to get in one bigger car. Guess what,... if that car hits the truck....

well,... you as customer are screwed.

While on the other side, most of OSS softwares are produced with numer of developers that you can stuck on a bike. But if that bike hits a truck and you really depend on that software,... who stops you to hire some programmers to continue work on a paid basis?

company that made my previous accounting software went bankrupt and I left with nothing. btw.

Kylix I bought??? Borland stopped working on it.

RAV antivirus for Linux server I licenced for one year? M$ bought RAV and discontinued Linux products (That was 3 months after signing agreement for one year).

If you want more examples, just ask

And you say I'm idiot to trust open source, face it and look at the mirror, you'll find idiot in there

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, which one of these is unusable at present?

Except for Win95 of course.

And indeed how long has it been since the Linux Kernel 1.9 has been supported/updated?

Re:Licensing

[justsomebody]

Yeah, probably right (looking from the company side), but you did forget two things (on users side).

1. How much was the cost of OSS dissapointment and how much closed.
2. What were the ways out of the mess when project died.

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Depends on how much the cost of the new solution was, for each situation. Remembering that the initial cost of start up using the project has already been taken into account.

2. Again, it will be the same in both situations. It may be easier for users if they choose a closed source path, as vendors may be able to sell/ make as part of the deal a migration solution(remembering it will be in their interests to do so), especially if the previous solution was reasonably well known.

Re:Licensing

[justsomebody]

Sorry, no karma here:)

1. Depends on how much the cost of the new solution was, for each situation. Remembering that the initial cost of start up using the project has already been taken into account.

????? WTF are you talking about, where is the cost of starting phproject which I use now instead of a proprietary solution? mysql? openoffice??? freepascal and lazarus???, anjuta and gcc???, Gimp???, Evolution???, Epiphany???. These are all tools that my company depends on

2. Had already too many bad deals, to even start to believe you. I believe in proprietary if company stakes the source, (as MySQL, as Advanced Server, then money is not a problem)

Re:Licensing

[Crypto Gnome]

Forking thins the hurd (-1, terrible joke)

Forking is natural. Without it there wouldn't be a hurd needing thinning in the first place. (-2, *really* terrible joke)

Re:Licensing

[Vint Cerf]

If by "the BSDs" you mean Theo, and he's only against it because they're trying to eliminate advertising clauses.

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad we have Debian-legal. It keeps all the whiney little anal-retentive bitchs in one place, away from those of us doing some real work.

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Source will not work.

Yet it built the Internet and has kept it running for 4 decades. Brings a whole new meaning to "not working".

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

"You see software as a product, you should regard is as infrastructure. Somehow a society manages to build and support a road system.... and its not by magic. When the original builder is gone you can still use the road, and if you don't know how to fill a hole you get somebody to do it for you. And if you are really lucky you will get some community of road users to do it collectivly (something like a government perhaps?)"

Great, now we'll have lame software once the govt is in charge, just like a lame power grid and road system.

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

" There is a difference... For a closed source project there is a much higher critical number. Namely the point between profit and loss. You need a certain critical mass to support a closed source program and its backing company.

Even if you are the only one using a open source program you can continue to use and improve it as long as you like. The critical mass here is one.

Jeroen"

I think you're not understanding the economics correctly. A company can write software for only one customer, and keep doing it as long as the customer is willing to pay. So you can have a critical mass of one here. The upside of closed source is that you don't have to hire and manage people to write the code yourself, or hope someone else will do it and get it for free. You can just pay someone to do it, and if you're the only client, you can even negoitate to get the source yourself.

Re:Licensing

[cscx]

That statement rings so true, but it appears as though the facist moderators are trying to silence your thoughts.

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there seems to be one still out here.

Re:Licensing

[X-wes]

I believe the parent post has a point. An open-source project can be much harder-hit by a backing issue.

However, there is a critical point the parent post is missing. In open-source software, the backing comes from the community itself. As long as there are willing users who support community, there will be backing.

Often, even a free-software project will receive commercial products. Let's face it--Apache, OpenOffice.org, and many more (including previously Mozilla) have great corporate support. If a project is popular enough, someone will come along with suits and the dough.

And here's the best thing: if an open-source project loses its backing (its users), why should anyone care?

Oh no, an open-source project to build drivers for bluetooth toasters running on the Gamecube OS has failed... (and if you're that desperate for drivers, you can always look for help on SF.net...)

Re:Licensing

[ImpTech]

Huh? Why? Last I checked XFree86 4.4 was in precisely 0 Linux distributions. Big companies (except maybe software companies) are completely unaware of this "licensing problem", and will continue to be ignorant.

Re:Licensing

[scmason]

NO, staying with the defunct closed door model of the X11 core team would have been to downfall of Linux.

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

• That statement rings so true, but it appears as though the facist moderators are trying to silence your thoughts.

1. Create 2 seperate /. accounts, and when your comment is modded down, use other account to call moderators facists.
2. ?????
3. karma!

Looks like it ain't working all to well ;)

Re:Licensing

[schon]

how long has it been since the Linux Kernel 1.9 has been supported/updated?

Well, since 1.9 was a develpment version, the answer is that it's still being maintained, supported, and updated. 2.0.40 was released a couple of weeks ago.

From the FAQ

[Space cowboy]

What about GPL-compatibility?

The 1.1 license is not GPL-compatible. To avoid new issues with application programs that may be licensed under the GPL, the 1.1 licence is not being applied to client side libraries.

So, it seems that the main reason for a fork is no longer an issue ? No-one is going to be writing a new X-Server (well, I guess some of the embedded folks might, but that's about all I can think of), and they state that there's no issues with any client programs that you link with ... No problem for most of us then, unless it's for political reasons.

My position is that if you write/own the code you get to say how it's used. I don't think there's *any* argument against that, and I can see why they want to promote themselves in this world where perception is all. The issue is that all decisions have consequences - which may be why client-programs are not part of the deal :-) I seriously doubt that XFree86 *want* a code fork, and I think that freedesktop.org will give them a serious run for their money if the fork goes ahead.

I wonder if the forking argument itself (please say that correctly :-) has gathered sufficient momentum to cause the predicted split though - that would be a pity if so. For all that KDE and Gnome are competing desktops, and they have both co-evolved to their benefit over time, I think two competing windowing-system standards might have a harder time co-evolving... If they didn't, you'd have to wonder why there were 2 in the first place!

Simon.

Re:From the FAQ

[Ed Avis]

It prevents you including GPL-licensed code in an X server derived from XFree86; that is enough reason for Debian to avoid the new release, it seems.

Interesting that the FAQ now acknowledges that the 1.1 licence does not permit redistribution under the GPL; before, the XFree86 people were insisting that in their opinion it was allowed. Unless I'm confusing two different licences here.

Re:From the FAQ

[petabyte]

No, from what I'm told, the main reason to fork is the attitude taken by some members of the XFree Core Team. As you said, its their code and they can do what they want but the forking has already happened:

Xouvert
Freedesktop
Cygwin X

Personally I don't see myself ever using XFree 4.4 and am looking forward to a complete release of fd.o. When that happens, I'll likely be moving everything I can off XFree but that's just me.

Re:From the FAQ

[Nuclear Elephant]

No-one is going to be writing a new X-Server

On the contrary, FreeDesktop.org is writing one, and it's A. much more promising (supports some neat things too like drop shadows and translucent menus), and B. based on the original XFree86 libraries.

Re:From the FAQ

[mmurphy000]

So, it seems that the main reason for a fork is no longer an issue ? No-one is going to be writing a new X-Server (well, I guess some of the embedded folks might, but that's about all I can think of), and they state that there's no issues with any client programs that you link with ... No problem for most of us then, unless it's for political reasons.

I think part of the concern is over long-term intent. Mr. Dawes says applying the license to client-side libraries is "deferred", implying that it might be applied sometime later, though it appears that he thinks GPL compatibilty for the client-side libraries is somewhat important.

...I can see why they want to promote themselves in this world where perception is all.

Apache used to have an advertising clause and dropped it, yet people still know about Apache. Moreover, the number of people who will even notice these "advertisements" are fairly few -- how many ordinary folk are going to read and understand these lists of attributions? If they want XFree86.org to be on everyone's lips (for positive reasons), they'll need something more than this clause.

Re:From the FAQ

[platipusrc]

I think that what you're referring to is the Apache 2.0 license that had a clause about patents that some said conflicted with the GNU GPL but that the Apache Group said did not. I'm not sure, but I think the Apache 2.0 license has been revised further to make it more clear that it is GNU GPL compatible.

Re:From the FAQ

[plcurechax]

It prevents you including GPL-licensed code in an X server derived from XFree86; that is enough reason for Debian to avoid the new release, it seems.

Huh? It is well known that you cannot freely mix BSD (old 4 clause or new 3 clause) licensed code with GPL code in the same code base. You would have to make it entirely GPL, which is the 'viral' nature of GPL that BSD fans complain about.

Re:From the FAQ

[Ianoo]

Xouvert is dead. If you don't believe me check their mailing lists.

Re:From the FAQ

[pe1rxq]

They should stop complaining about it.....
I find it ironic that they choose a license that specificly allows relicensing and brag about its abilities and at the same time complain when somebody actually does it.....

BTW since microsoft used the BSD license ip stack doesn't that make their EULA just as viral by this logic?

Jeroen

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate Texas. I hate the Southern States of the US. Tbey are the social fuckups that are out of step with Western Culture.

These inbred fucks and their bullshit bible-belt are what's holding America back. If we could just kill all these bastards and repopulate teh South with smart people from California and New York, all would be good.

Bush is a prime example. A bitch who needs to b killed. I hope he is killed violently.

Re:From the FAQ

[plcurechax]

BTW since microsoft used the BSD license ip stack doesn't that make their EULA just as viral by this logic?


Yes, you cannot take any Microsoft changes to the BSD tcp/ip stack and re-introduce them back into BSD code bases, since the EULA prevents that.

Re:From the FAQ

[williamhooper]

No-one is going to be writing a new X-Server...

Three letters... VNC.

Re:From the FAQ

[Ed Avis]

You're completely right, I was confusing Apache and XFree86... why do these similar news stories come along at the same time? It's as if we were supposed to pay attention or something.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

that's what happens when you give it a gay ass french name.

Anyone knows that Americans will make or break an open source project, as Americans are the best developers in the world.

Re:From the FAQ

[Ed Avis]

Yes, it's well known that you can't mix old-style BSD and GPL, which is why Debian is avoiding the new licence, because it is a bit like old-style BSD in this respect.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Americans are the best developers in the world.

So that's why the American software industry is in free fall because Indian coders can do the same things for a tenth of the price. I should have guessed it was because you were so good.

It's obvious, though, when you think about it. All the best programmers are American. Like Linus Torvalds, the ex-football player who went on to start the famous all-American Linux operating system, for example.

Re:From the FAQ

[AndyS]

I think that the reason this is coming up now is BECAUSE of all the threats of forks. I think these people want to make everything else seem like a complete fork.

Re:From the FAQ

[msh104]

indeed, it is very neat. the problem is that all the drivers will need to be rewritten/ported. you can't just write wrappers around the old drivers. right now we only have fbdev/vesa stuff and some other stuff you really don't want to use right now. getting the drivers finisched right now is more important then ever.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

The license used is the counter-GPL, it is also viral but allows non-GPL code to be added whereas the GPL is viral and prevents non-GPL code from being added. To clarify the distinction between the ideological and the purely practical. The ideological group is the primary affected group by this license, rather than acknowledge the primary value of this to the support of continued production of necessary software, offense is taken. The purely practical acknowledge that in-house improvements can be made with code they have licensed from commercial sources, allowing for a perhaps improved version of the software.

Re:From the FAQ

[TheLinuxSRC]

According to Xouvert's home page a release is scheduled for April 1, 2004. Of course that could be some kind of april fool's joke....

Re:From the FAQ

[Ann Elk]

Except that Microsoft does not use the BSD IP stack.

• I worked for nearly 10 years in the Windows NT networking group.
• I worked very closely with the guys who wrote the TCP/IP stack that shipped with NT 3.51 and later.
• I know the NT TCP/IP sources very well.
• There is some residual BSD sources in the resolver (DNS client) code (most of which has been rewritten), and in the piece-of-shit FTP client, but not in the TCP/IP stack.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you cannot take any Microsoft changes to the BSD tcp/ip stack and re-introduce them back into BSD code bases, since the EULA prevents that.

Not so much the EULA as the fact that they don't release the source. Oh wait, you mean the leaked sources...

Re:From the FAQ

[larry bagina]

yes you can. The problem isn't license incompatability, it's that your program needs to give credit to BSD/XFree86, which can cause a practical problem if you need to credit 30 different people in your help screen and other materials.

Re:From the FAQ

[lussmu]

much more promising (supports some neat things too like drop shadows and translucent menus),

And why on earth is that promising? Where, oh where are you trying to take Linux? I thought Linus said this was the year Linux is going to break through to the desktop - if so, I think we should mainly focus on finishing up the user interface and making it more robust, not on stupid interface modification like shadows and transparency that only make it more difficult to do anything remotely useful, but look cool.

Re:From the FAQ

[msh104]

just wondering, why do you think many of the windows 2000 folks upgraded to XP? because it had a shiny happy interface. it might not be a good reason to upgrade, but it is a fact that 99% of the users love eye candy over stability/usability/security whatever. I myself think kde and such have enough eye candy already. I really can't care is they use real or fake transparantie. I agree with you that it is time to work on creating stable good code. there is allready enough candy for everybody.

Re:From the FAQ

[Ed Avis]

I think there may be a licence incompatibility in that any work derived from the BSD code must give credit in docs and help screens, but the GPL does not have any such restriction, so if you tried to distribute the work under the GPL then you would have lost the restriction about giving credit, and (by some legal theory I don't understand and which may or may not exist) the people who get the code from you and try to exercise their rights under the GPL would be infringing the copyright on the BSD-licensed code.

Similarly, if I had some code that said 'you can use this but only while doing a handstand' and tried to combine it with GPL'd code, I couldn't distribute the resulting work under the GPL because people receiving it wouldn't know about the handstand condition. I would have to distribute it under 'GPL plus handstand' - but then this wouldn't be allowed by the GPLd code I started with, since you're not allowed to add extra restrictions.

Re:From the FAQ

[Alan Cox]

Advertising clauses are a nightmare to manage and for anything with a UI really the wrong way to get noticed.

An XFree86 logo during the X server startup would get noticed!

Re:From the FAQ

[Guspaz]

Yep, the resolver link is pretty obvious just by the file structure used alone;

c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

And under *nix:

/etc/hosts

Gee, a bit of a similarity there, you think?

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

it is promising because they are looking at long term goals not just pretty shit.

Those of use who bother to do any research know this.

Re:From the FAQ

[Nuclear Elephant]

If Linux is going to even have a chance at breaking through to the desktop world, it has to stop looking like crap. With a little customization, and FreeDesktop, I was able to make my desktop look like this: http://www.nuclearelephant.com/images/screenshot.j pg which could compete with a crappintosh any day...but little features and ATTENTION TO DETAIL (something that's missing in Linux) is one of the big reasons the average non-tech individual's going to want to use it. I'd love to see hover expansion and other features too....while I agree stability and functionality is more important, an aesthetically pleasing interface is critical to desktop assimilation.

Re:From the FAQ

[bigredgiant1]

I think you're forgetting that the Y project was put back into motion. The goals of that project already overcome those of the current X. With enough effort the Y project could take over if needed.

Re:From the FAQ

[HaraldNH]

The reason to fork is basically something that has turned into a pissing contest, with attitudes on all sides. It will either blow over, or it will happen. If it does, the loosers will be the Open Source community and the users (us).

The basic problem with forking X, is that it is such a huge and rather un-structured code base. Which means that we are probably talking about a few dozens of people who are able to maintain and develop the stuff. A few of these are in the UNIX-companies around, a couple are at fd.o, and by far the largest group is at XFree86. And I've not seen these people talking about defecting to some other project.

Re:From the FAQ

[JDizzy]

This is exactly correct. It is not a technical issue at all. The issue stems from the fact that the GPL steeals code, and doens't attribute where it comes from. This is the core issue! If I write a groovy program, and some GPL zealot decided it is suitable for their needs, they can simply take it, remove any mention of my authorship, and call it theirs under the GPL. So not only is the GPL viral, it is also unethical.

Remember the GPL was writen specificly to combat the Freedoms, and virtue of the BSD style license. RMS while at MIT saw much code beign writen in BSD style license, and some of that code was converted to proprietary code. This is how the GPL was born. Beings forced to maintain a list of contributors is against the idea of a non-free license like the GPL, and makes it harder to assymilate code that isn't yours.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, recent discussion on the mailing list has been whether or not to change the date to April 2nd so that people wouldn't think it was a joke.

But they never really came to a conclusive decision.

Re:From the FAQ

[be-fan]

The underlying framework supports drop-shadows and translucent menus, but can be used for much more:

- OpenGL will be used for drawing, so you can have very rich, yet fast, vector-graphics based applications.

- Back-buffering each window (which is what enables transparency and shadows) allows you to eliminate all sorts of flicker and lag during resizing and window moving.

- New extensions (Composite + XDamage) allow for clever window managers to do useful things like Expose-style features, screen-scrapers (for things like VNC), magnification tools, etc.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

if so, I think we should mainly focus on finishing up the user interface and making it more robust

You're right, of course. As the project manager of Anyone Anywhere Who Has Ever Written Any Free Software, I will make sure to let them know that shadows and transparency are officially pushed back to 2005, and all man hours are to be spent on Robustosity.

I'll also redirect the efforts of those guys in France who were writing ANOTHER image gallery program. Seriously, don't we have enough? We're working on Robustness now, guys! Pay attention!

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh? Linux isn't going to have "even a chance" if it doesn't have gumdrop widgets, translucency, drop-shadows and other visual frills which add NOTHING to productivity?

Ah yeah, because Windows 95 never had a chance did it? Not MacOS before X? You have no idea what you're talking about. Desktop success comes via a strong application base, reliability, ease-of-updating and other factors.

It's in no way "critical", as other OSes have shown. Besides, your "even a chance" is nonsensical, as Linux desktop adoption has surpassed Apple's. It's still small, but it's growing rapidly.

Re:From the FAQ

[baxissimo]

Please back up your outrageous claims with some real data. I, for one, upgraded to XP only because the IT folks told me I had to. I'm not sure why they decided everyone needed to upgrade, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't because they wanted everyone to have more eye candy. And when I did finally upgrade, I immediately turned off all the silly PreSkool fluff and made it look like Win95/2000 again.

And besides, even if you're right, Linux is in a different place in the "hierarchy of needs" than Windows right now. Windows users haven't had to worry about lack of useful documentation or easy configuration for years, so they can afford to obsess over eye candy more than poor Linux users who have enough trouble just getting their printing to work

More effort should be going to providing more usable and better documented GUIs, not making more eye candy. But this is open source, and people work on what they want to work on. And people don't want to work on making things usable. There's no fun in that. You can't post to Slashdot saying "hey! i was just up programming all night -- check out my new highly usable CUPS setup wizard". No one will care, because the folks reading Slashdot all got CUPS working ages ago. What do they care if it's now easier to do? But you can post "check out these super new transparent menus!" and all the 14-year olds will gasp in awe and amazement and call you a h4X0r 60D.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. No one will tell you how to release your code. But the new licence can potentially put a hole in the GPL. Linux people don't want that, so yeah, expect people to start dropping it. An alternative x-server has been in development for several years (freedesktop.org), and I would expect distributions to start switching in a year or so. Think of this as a rock in the middle of a fast flowing river. The water will find a way around it. Once the water has started going the other way, there's no turning back.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just weird. Your name calling seems to indicate that you don't like OSX. But you're using an OS very similar to its underlying system, and went to what seems like a good deal of effort to try and turn your desktop into a copy of it.

Re:From the FAQ

[Citizen of Earth]

No, from what I'm told, the main reason to fork is the attitude taken by some members of the XFree Core Team.

More than simple attitude, the 1.1 license is a bold declaration that you can't trust them.

Re:From the FAQ

[Crypto Gnome]

I wonder if the forking argument itself (please say that correctly :-) has gathered sufficient momentum

Eye'm from Eyerlnd, ewe insensitive clod! Me mothr made me kiss the Blarney stone when eye wuz young, and eye've never been able to forget its gritty flavor. As sure as they're leprechauns in Eyerlnd, you know eye'm always forking careful to forking say things correctly.

Re:From the FAQ

[macshit]

It is well known that you cannot freely mix BSD (old 4 clause or new 3 clause) licensed code with GPL code in the same code base.

No, it's not `well known', and in fact, it's not true!

The revised (`3 clause') BSD license is perfectly compatible with the GPL. Since 99.9% of all `BSD licensed' code uses the revised BSD license, there's basically no problem at all.

Of course the resulting aggregate program must have its source distributed (&c) as part of its source uses the GPL, but that's pretty obvious if you're using GPL'd source code.

[The original (`4 clause') BSD license is indeed incompatible with the GPL, but that's largely academic, as no one actually uses that anymore.]

Re:From the FAQ

[lintux]

That hosts file existed in Win9x already. Just the presence of this single file doesn't mean the codebase was "stolen".

Gee, Windows has a filesystem with directories, I think they copied SysVFS. Maybe SCO can try to sue Microsoft? ;-))

So anyway, Windows 2000 having the BSD IP stack is a well known thing. I'm not going to say "fact" because I'm not 100% sure, just 99%.

Re:From the FAQ

[Micah]

Of course, that would also make it GPL-incompatible, if the license prohibited changing/removing the logo...

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the post. Nice to see what freedesktop.org can do.

And for all you guys flaming translucency -- the big issue is that the ability to do this == flexability which the original xserver lacks and all other major windowing systems have.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Worse, the logo on my cell-phone or car windshield will really offend me.

Think outside the wintel-box. Linux belongs almost everywhere, and if XFree86 wants to be there, they need to start thinking beyond a Win95 mentality as well.

Re:From the FAQ

[Lispy]

May I ask what graphic card you are running? I wasn't able to get further than 1024x768 using the Xves driver from the package. Are you that lucky to have a supported card or did you use some sort of voodoo I haven't figured out yet? Or are you using, yikes, the framebuffer?

Here's my screeny, btw.

cu,
Lispy

Re:From the FAQ

[terracon]

This was a problem with NETWORK printing not local printing. Local worked fine it was setting it up on esr's network which was the problem.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

But they never really came to a conclusive decision.

Well that sounds like a project thats going places!

Straight into the ground at the very least.

Re:From the FAQ

[FauxPasIII]

> It prevents you including GPL-licensed code in an X server derived from
> XFree86; that is enough reason for Debian to avoid the new release, it seems.

Debian just moved X 4.3.0 into the unstable tree about a week and a half ago; I don't think any of us Debianistas were really worried about seeing XFree 4.4 in any of the three main Debian trunks this year anyway. ;)

Re:From the FAQ

[Guido von Guido]

I think this "Windows 2000 TCP stack based on BSD's" thing is a bit of an urban legend. Clearly they used parts of it in various spots, but if they had based it on BSD's it would obviously work much better...

Re:From the FAQ

[macshit]

Windows users haven't had to worry about lack of useful documentation or easy configuration for years, so they can afford to obsess over eye candy

Hmmm, where is this `useful documentation' you speak of? The windows documentation I'm familiar with (not happily, but sometimes you gotta do unpalatable things) is for the most part completely useless, e.g., it simply restates what is already obvious, without giving any deeper insight or addressing common problems...

Re:From the FAQ

[nihilogos]

And why on earth is that promising?

He/she didn't say why it was promising. He/she said, it was promising *and* also supported some neat things like drop shadows and translucency.

Re:From the FAQ

[nihilogos]

http://www.nuclearelephant.com/images/screenshot.j pg

That's freedesktop? Cool - how stable/fast is it?

Re:From the FAQ

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

What other standard system directory in mswindows has the same name as a standard unix directory? The answer, of course, is NONE. The point your parent was making has as much to do with the the /etc/ as it does with the hosts.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Such Unix intellectual property do not belong to anybody, it is pretty obvious that Linux doesn't own that intellectual property. BSD is funded by American tax dollars, thus any American company has the right to use such public information. It doesn't even make sense to criticize an American company from using the intellectual property funded by their own tax dollars. So let's shut up and do something useful for Linux, if that's your real concern.

Re:From the FAQ

[prockcore]

why do you think many of the windows 2000 folks upgraded to XP? because it had a shiny happy interface.

I upgraded my wife's computer to XP for many reasons, and the interface wasn't one of them.

First, all of her old games don't work under win2k, but they work on XP.

Second, her scanner and cdburner don't work correctly under win2k, but work on XP.

Drivers and application support are better reasons to upgrade to XP than the interface (which my wife just finds confusing)

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow it's strange that everybody makes such a fuss about this license, as it is clearly a free license, even if it is not GPL-compatible (many free licenses are not, this doesn't mean they are not allowed by the Debian policy). One can even argue that the new clause is not an advertisement clause per se, as it does not require to aknowledge use in any advertisement (as the original BSD), but only somewhere in the documentation.

This said, it looks like the problem is more whether it is OK for a project central to free software, and which receives lots of input from the community, to suddenly change its terms of use. Clearly people are unhappy about that, and with good reasons. Including XFree86 in a distribution is not just like any other package.

The worst part is that, actually, they could probably have reached the same goal and kept GPL compatibility, namely by allowing clause 2c of the GPL as an option:

2c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and [...]

This is a bit hard to interpret in the case of a graphical interface, but I believe one could say that by definition an Xserver, when used for anything useful, is interactive. The fact they did not seems rather political (but the way they are bashed may be too).

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

I specifically recall certain files in the Windows TCP/IP subsystem that contained BSD license information at the header of the files. Search through several of them, with a hex editor or text editor, and you will probably see it. It's been several years though, so I can't tell you which files that they are.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay for you. You succeeded in taking Gnome 2, and made it look like a crappy Mac knock-off. I don't know why in the hell you were modded up. You merely wanted to post a pic of your ugly desktop...

Most commercial distributions look better than that.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

I know the NT TCP/IP sources very well.

Yeah, and now so do we.

Re:From the FAQ

[13Echo]

That's not "Freedesktop". It's XF86 with Gnome 2 and a generic Mac skin on top of it.

Re:From the FAQ

[Spunk]

Pardon my ignorance...

but 3 is new and 4 is old? What? :)

Re:From the FAQ

[Listen Up]

Wrong. Look at this link:

http://wint.decsy.ru/du/DIGITAL/UNIXNT/CH2.HTM

And learn something about Windows NT system level programming and its relationships to BSD (including the differences in networking code).

Re:From the FAQ

[Hooded One]

The old one had four clauses, the fourth being the advertising clause. The new one has only three.

Re:From the FAQ

[LardBrattish]

I already worked this out from black box experimentation on my DSL connection:-

XP Home average 43Kb/s
Red Hat 9 (same PC) 50Kb/s
Mac OS X.2 53Kb/s

Nope, no BSD code in the M$ IP Stack

Re:From the FAQ

[macshit]

The old/original BSD license had 4 `clauses' of which one required you to mention Berkeley in any advertising/documentation for the end product. This `advertising clause' was, as you might imagine, not only a huge practical problem, but incompatible with the GPL.

The revised BSD license -- which almost all current `BSD licensed' software uses -- deleted the advertising clause, removing the conflict with the GPL.

Re:From the FAQ

[samhalliday]

you've been in the computer business longer than ten years, and your slashdot ID is THAT high? wow, you must have actually been working those ten years!

Re:From the FAQ

[samhalliday]

that is without a doubt, the most unscientific experiment i have ever seen.

have you ever considered a career in the social sciences?

Re:From the FAQ

[MsGeek]

Actually the "shiny happy interface" is the main reason I'm sticking with 2K over XP in the few cases I still run Windows. That "shiny happy interface" eats up no mean amount of resources. 2K is leaner and meaner and able to run on more computers. A K6-2 will struggle under XP, but will fly under 2K. There are ways of killing some of the eye candy in 2K to make it even faster.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

It must be FD.o X as it has translucent menus and shadows and other features only on FD.o X

Re:From the FAQ

[Talez]

A K6-2 will struggle under XP, but will fly under 2K.

As someone who's actually run Windows XP on a K6-2 300 I can tell you that memory is way more important than CPU power.

So long as I turned off the memory hungry features (Fast User Switching) it was pretty snappy even with themes on. I love the Silver theme. It doesn't have a stupid Fisher Price look like Luna.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

You really think the XP network stack can't do 50Kb/s ?

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Where does it say it related to bsd ?
The only thing they mention is that winsock is similiar to bsd sockets... SIMILIAR.. not DERIVED, moron.
They even return completely different error codes (not compatible) and have different call semantics all over the place.
Before posting something pull your head out of your ass please.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

There are cheap hacks on top of XF86 that do similar things that look like this, only they are much slower.

Re:From the FAQ

[packeteer]

The IT folks probably forced you to upgrade to make their job easier. If they replace all the machines with XP all they hafta do is troubleshoot XP. It is much easier for them than first having to figure out what os the broken machine is and then sending someone familiar with that OS and that problem to fix it. It just reduces the number of different types of errors IT will encounter.

Re:From the FAQ

[LardBrattish]

What, same file, same router, same ISP, same computer (in two out of the three cases) only variables OS and the precise time I downloaded the file - I think that's a reasonable test...

Re:From the FAQ

[Nasarius]

Wow. The scary thing is that you're probably serious. Okay, suffice to say, at ~50KB/s, the speed of your TCP/IP stack is not the determining factor. Try transferring a few gig and doing fast pings over a LAN, then we can begin to talk about accuracy.

Re:From the FAQ

[Tyreth]

My position is that if you write/own the code you get to say how it's used. I don't think there's *any* argument against that, and I can see why they want to promote themselves in this world where perception is all.

At the same time, anybody has the right to choose whether they want to use software that is under a particular license. No one has to sign on the dotted line. So they've chosen to not use the new XFree86. They are allowed to do that, and they are allowed to fork.

Re:From the FAQ

[ajs]

"My position is that if you write/own the code you get to say how it's used"

That can be your position if you like, but it's not the case.

If you write/own the code you get to say how it's NOT used. How it IS used is entirely up to distributions and individuals who choose to use it on their own, and in this case, I applaud those who choose to steer clear. It's not that I'm a rabid GPL vs whatever proponent, it's just that I look at the landscape of licensing and I don't see any good reason to invent yet another variant in XFree's move. The MPL was a good example of when you have to roll your own. They had certain contractual reasons that neither the GPL nor the BSD license was appropriate.

XFree just seems to want to "make it their own", and while they are free to do that, we're also free to take the old source base and walk away.

Like or dislike the GPL, but you really have to face the fact that it's the most commonly used open source-compatible license (pre-dating that term, of course), and being fundamentally incompatible with it makes you a very questionable choice for an open source platform.

Re:From the FAQ

[NateTech]

He could just find another test like that which shows M$ to be faster and then go to work in their Marketing department. :-)

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, no one could think the horrible NT IP stack came from BSD. My suspicion is that it was introduced in win2k when things actually started to work most of the time.

Re:From the FAQ

[NateTech]

Hmm actually I upgraded for the roaming WiFi support which works a hell of a lot better than any of my Linux distros. But that was a company laptop, and I had to have Windows on it anyway. My Mac's do roaming wireless just fine too.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only does (practically) nobody use old-style BSD licenses for new stuff, but since 1999, the original license was changed as well, and if you want to use BSD code copyrighted by UCB where the source code still includes the advertising clause, you can delete and/or ignore it.

Re:From the FAQ

[mcbridematt]

Perhaps Microsoft's telnet client in 2000 and later is BSD too? It looks BSD, but appears to do things like call advapi32.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, many people are probably going to care about all that eye candy, because "everybody else has it".

Personally, I don't particularly like the MacOS X look, but I do like the feel - and this is as a Unix user...unlike Windows (emulated by KDE and various other recent Unix desktop envs and apps), MacOS X application conventions don't hijack ctrl for invoking high-level functions, but leave it free to be bound to things like cursor movement. MacOS X text widgets have emacs key bindings by default.

As long as "Unix" (not specifically Linux, as 99% of the stuff people see runs on plenty of other systems as well) desktops aim to emulate Windows conventions that conflict with the preferences of many developers, no single, homogenous, one-size-fits-all desktop will dominate...whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is an open question, I don't believe that the availability of inconsistent applications is necessarily a problem, but it will slow down adoption.

Re:From the FAQ

[SnowZero]

Wrong time frame I think; I first started hearing rumors about it being integrated in the NT 5 timeframe in 1998 while I worked there as an intern (NT 5 later was rebranded Win2k). The rumors came from *outside* the company when people noticed substantial changes in how the betas handled networking. What is sure is that TCP/IP mostly got rewritten, and that it has some curiously non-IPV4 compliant corner case behavior that happened to be identical to the BSD stack. More power to them if they found something better and ported it and hacked on it from there.

MS isn't afraid to tear-out and replace modules, or even to try some competing approaches for a while (usually an experimental new version alongside the existing one being slowly extended). That is, until one of them gets a bad BillG review, of course. The project I was working on in NT-imaging seems to have been canned, which is too bad; That time the experiment lost. The only user-visible evidence in Windows that it ever existed is a control panel icon a coworker of mine made.

Re:From the FAQ

[dvdeug]

My position is that if you write/own the code you get to say how it's used.

Some of that code dates back 30 years. Very little of it was written by the people who are changing this license; they're just the latest caretakers.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you are to incompitent to disable the themes, multiuser switching and other things....

Re:From the FAQ

[struberg]

there are 2 different mechan1sm for ip handling in WinNT

a) berkley core that can be programmed via the std C libraries sys/socket.h (bind(), listen(), accept(),..)

b) a WindowMessage based system that uses ad a) internally via a wrapper. This one is used by most of Win programms.

This explains the different delay times.

But if you look closer from the outside to a version > WinNT 4.0 SP2 you will get nearly the same response like the BSD branches of those times does.

best regards,
strub

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

How can it be dead? It was never even alive.

Xouvert was just a bunch of idiots who didn't know how to program. They didn't even manage to finish slurping the XFree86 source tree into arch before losing interest.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

"My position is that if you write/own the code you get to say how it's used."

I've written several thousands lines of code that are included in XFree86 4.4. I certainly don't agree with their unilateral (and illegal) license change.

I realize that fighting this idiocy in court is a waste of time, and instead choose to contribute to freedesktop.org. XFree86 will disappear unless David figures out that he can't do everything by himself.

Re:From the FAQ

[lintux]

I'm sure there are more with a name like this. Filenames have absolutely nothing to do with "stolen code", and I expect any sane SlashDotter to know and understand that. If they don't, they should also do a very good job at believing everything SCO says.

Re:From the FAQ

[scmason]

mod this up. It is not offtopic, no matter how much we all want to bitch about M$

Re:From the FAQ

[Ann Elk]

You are correct in that there are two mechanisms for programming sockets under Windows, but you are incorrect in how they work and interact.

First, there is no "berkley code that can be programmed via the std C libraries..." Part of the Winsock API specification is based on Berkley sockets -- bind(), listen(), accept(), etc. The design of the APIs is based on Berkley sockets, but the implementation is not.

The Window Message based APIs are not, in general, just wrappers around the traditional Berkley APIs. If you really want the gory details, I can provide them with some authority. (I was head of the Winsock 2 Framework group, and I wrote the Winsock 2 implementation that shipped with NT 4.)

Re:From the FAQ

[Ann Elk]

Actually, I've been in the biz for more than 20 years... I only joined Slashdot a year or so ago (hangs head in shame).

I'm trying hard to embrace open source so that I can a) wean myself off the Microsoft tit, and b) atone for past sins.

I'm not a Microsoft appologist, it just bugs me when I see people spreading misinformation that I know is absolutely 100% untrue. I guess that's just life on the Internet...

Re:From the FAQ

[Ann Elk]

The oh-so-lame FTP client was always based on BSD. It's pretty gross code, and no one wanted to touch it. Only the minimum work was done to make it build and (sort of) run under NT.

The telnet client has a strange history. At one point (back in NT 3.1 and 3.5, I think) it was basically just the normal Windows terminal app. Someone had the bright (?) idea to have it talk to a virtual serial port. So, a driver implemented the virtual serial port, which talked to a user-mode helper service, which issued the socket calls to talk to the remote telnet server. Now, just imagine the ring transitions, imagine the context switches, imagine the buffer copies. And, of course, imagine the total lack of performance.

Later (NT 3.51 maybe?) the virtual serial port bullshit was ripped out, and the terminal app was hacked into being a (slightly less lame) telnet client.

For Win2K (maybe) and XP (for sure) a "new" telnet client was shipped. I've never seen the source to this version, so I do not know its origin. However, looking at its structure in a debugger, I would guess that it's not BSD based. It uses threads and async I/O, handles different language locales, etc. In other words, it appears very un-BSD like. But that's just my hunch.

Re:From the FAQ

[Eivind]

My position is that if you write/own the code you get to say how it's used. I don't think there's *any* argument against that,

CERTAINLY there are argument against that.

Copyrigth-law gives you, as creator, the rigth to decide under what conditions copies can be made and distributed. (that is why it's called *copy*right afterall.) It does not, should not and MUST not give you ANY say in "how it's used".

There are strong forces that are figthing to change this, to give creators a rigth to control how something is used. Luckily for the free world they have yet to suceed. I for one will figth tooth and nail to keep them from suceeding.

It's rather shocking to see, on Slashdot of all places, a person who doesn't only think that such ideas *should* suceed, but even seems to think that they *have* suceeded, to the point where there's "no argument with that".

As a content-creator, I respect your rigth to refuse to give me your copy. I accept your rigth to stipulate rules I must follow if I wish to distribute or copy your work further. I do *not* accept that you have *ANY* say in what I do with a legally acquired copy.

I realize it's possible you where just formulating yourself sloppily, and that you don't really mean that creators should control use. But it's such a dangerous notion that I felt I had to respond anyway.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad wording. I meant 'how it can be distributed' actually. I agree with your sentiment wholeheartedly :-)

Simon

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad wording - I meant "how it can be distributed/copied" actually - I agree with your sentiment over control.

"Sloppy" Simon

Re:From the FAQ

[samhalliday]

only variables OS and the precise time

like i said, try social science...

thats like saying "i drove 3 similar looking cars running on different petrol (gas) to see if Lotus had a better top speed. the only difference was the time of day i did it at (rush hour?), how long i did the test for and the place i did it (city/motorway(freeway)?). oh, and the 3rd car was a Ferrari.

the point i am trying to make is this: your variables were all over the show. if you want a fair test you need to compare with EVERYTHING identical, even the load (and there has to be a lot of it, different types, over a long period of time to get good stats) with the only difference being the stack. thats without even mentioning that you didn't even compare a BSD flavour (MacOS does not count), hence my Lotus gag :-/

Re:From the FAQ

[Greg W.]

An XFree86 logo during the X server startup would get noticed!

Only after crashing/restarting X. How often do you do that? (Unless of course you're a laptop user....)

Re:From the FAQ

[Listen Up]

NO MORON. I was saying that NT is NOT derived from BSD. Hence, the post I was REPLYING TO.

Fuck, people on Slashdot are stupid sometimes.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Good job on following along there. Not! Learn to read and parse English and then maybe you won't get modded down for being redundant.

Re:From the FAQ

[Just Some Guy]

translucency, drop-shadows and other visual frills which add NOTHING to productivity?

I've mentioned this before, but we don't know that those "frills" won't add productivity until we try it. I could imagine that a combination of translucency and drop-shadows could make a clear visual indicator of activity in a given application if done right. For example, maybe windows that hadn't been focused recently could lose contrast and start to fade into the background.

That may turn out to be a stupid idea - Lord knows I've had my share - but the point is that noone knows whether that would work or not right now because we don't have the framework to easily experiment.

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

*yawn*

Re:From the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using the 'new' telnet program before Microsoft bought it and included in W2K. I do not remember what it was called back then, but it WAS the very same program except for the copyright message (which did not mention Microsoft).

Re:From the FAQ

[man_of_mr_e]

I think you might want to rethink that. Read this:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/ 6/19/05641/7357

Re:From the FAQ

[technomagesteve]

You could install OpenDarwin on your x86 box to substitute for OSX.

fp

[Anonymous Coward]

FP

I Hate Texas

[Anonymous Coward]

Who else agrees?

The southern states of the US are populated by inbred fucks.

I want to kill them all.

Anyone with me?

Re:I Hate Texas

[Anonymous Coward]

Texas hates you.

Don't fuck with Wisconsin.

Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait for the major distributions to drop xfree86 and for there to be a replacement for it. Xfree has been great while it lasted, but it's very crufty and a replacement would be welcome.

We'd probably go through growing pains associated with transfers to other graphical servers, but in the end the best will win.

Question...

[j0nkatz]

Story says "XFree86 4.4 Released"
What's it been released from?

Re:Question...

[dzym]

"mortal coils".

rimshot, etc.

Re:Question...

[Anonymous Coward]

My anus.

What other alternatives?

[brainkiller]

What other alternatives are there to Xfree?

Re:What other alternatives?

[Sweetshark]

Freedesktop X server
y windows

Re:What other alternatives?

[larry bagina]

There are some commercial X Servers for linux (MetroX, for example). Of course, if XFree86 isn't free enough for you, you probably wouldn't touch MetroX with a 10-foot pole. Solaris uses something else for XWindows (and it includes display postscript). Of course, that's not "free" either.

PicoGUI and Berlin (or whatever they renamed themselves this week) are still in the development stage. GTK and some games can run under direct vga acess too.

Re:What other alternatives?

[wed128]

there's the freedesktop.org xserver, as well as directfb, Y and other "non-x" things...

Re:What other alternatives?

[David McBride]

Y Windows is currently under heavy development and not yet suited for end-users -- and is unlikely to be so for a while.

Re:What other alternatives?

[mst76]

All alternatives suffer from a lack of (accelerated) drivers.

Re:What other alternatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

DirectFB.

Re:What other alternatives?

[NanoGator]

"What other alternatives are there to Xfree? "

Windows, but if the license of X is what really bugs you...

Re:What other alternatives?

[bjarvis354]

I have been thinking about giving X server a compile from the CVS. But I would rather have packages. Does anyone know of any packages for Debian? I doubt it since it is very experimental..But I thought I would ask.

Re:What other alternatives?

[burns210]

Xovert or similar was a somewhat recent fork of Xfree, to try and change how it was deveolped, if i recall. Sounded interesting.

Re:What other alternatives?

[David McBride]

You probably mean the Y server, not X. And we're using Arch, not CVS.

Andy Suffield has been working on the project; he's got some stuff up at http://people.debian.org/~asuffield/.

By the way, the modifications to libiterm required to support Y have already entered Debian Unstable, so you don't have to install that seperately now.

Re:What other alternatives?

[Slack3r78]

No, he probably meant X Server - ie: Keith Packard's implementation over at FreeDesktop.org.

Re:What other alternatives?

[Via_Patrino]

There's also Xfree86 4.4rc2 it's still old license and a good start to a fork.

Re:What other alternatives?

[bjarvis354]

I actually meant freedesktop.org's X Server, but I had no idea Y was so far along!

Thanks for the links, I am going to try it out on my Debian unstable laptop.

Re:What other alternatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

that's bullshit.
freedesktops server is just build on xfree86. same drivers.

Re:What other alternatives?

[BiggerIsBetter]

I've found Xi Graphics to have a very good X Server. Only real problem is that it doesn't handle Nvidia cards. It's very fast too.

Re:What other alternatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

> that's bullshit.
> freedesktops server is just build on xfree86. same drivers.

I think you've confused freedesktop with Xouvert. Xouvert is a fork from XFree86, but they don't appear to have any of their own code yet, and people have been questioning if the project is still alive. The freedesktop Xserver is an independent implementation, based on Keith Packard's Kdrive Xserver. From the freedesktop Xserver FAQ:

Q: Couldn't we just write a wrapper for XFree86 drivers and use them?

A: Essentially, no. There are a large number of calls from XFree86 drivers into XFree86's DDX layer. Furthermore, XFree86 drivers don't support acceleration in the same way, so offscreen pixmaps wouldn't be supportable as far as I know.

Re:What other alternatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

you might have noticed already, but Xfree itself is hardly suited for end users.

The most visible bloat in software today is the combination of KDE and Xfree. Kill it quick, before it spreads!

Re:What other alternatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

> There's also Xfree86 4.4rc2 it's still old license and a good start to a fork.

The folks at FDO have just done that.

Re:What other alternatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

i think he said alternative.

windows doesnt qualify as a toy let alone a legit alternative to something with real power.

Re:What other alternatives?

[Mr. Piddle]

What other alternatives are there to Xfree?

Well, if you are a purist and don't mind a lack of drivers, you can go straight to using X11R6. This is the foundation for every UNIX vendor's windowing system, too (except for, uh, the drivers).

Re:What other alternatives?

[NanoGator]

"windows doesnt qualify as a toy let alone a legit alternative to something with real power."

There are a lot of 3D artists that would disagree with you.

yeah lets go drop X from our distros

[Anonymous Coward]

because we all know theres another fucking option

Xserver

[MooKore 2004]

Maybe its time to get more people looking at Xserver?

Re:Xserver

[Nuclear Elephant]

I'd switch to FDO if they would write some GLX extensions and add a few more user interface features. As of now it looks awesome, is architected well, but it's a tad slow and useless without GLX. (I'm using the ATI version)

Re:Xserver

[erikharrison]

XServer is an experimental project, based off of KDrive. It is -

1) An experimental driver architecture

2) An expertimental set of X extensions, dependent on the new driver architecture for performance reasons

3) The umbrella for the Keiths more mainstream extensions to X, including XDamage (which is a dependency for the compositing extension).

According to the guys on the XServer list, the XServer is not only not ready for prime time, but it may not ever be a real canidate for an XFree replacement because of it's experimental nature.

Re:Xserver

[EngMedic]

not until it supports my (far too expensive) pretty NVIDIA card and lets it do it's shiny graphics enhancing thing.

So they stick to the new license...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the deal.. if the new license isn't such a big deal, why doesn't the XFree group revert ot the old one? There is something in the new license that is really important to them, so its not exactly a minor wording change. If this were a lot of trouble over nothing, they would have backed off to a license they've _been_ releasing code under for years. I'll stick with the version that people with more legal experience than me say is best. I thank RMS and the distros for watching out for me by keeping up with these licensing issues.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[0racle]

Ya, Im glad that RMS et al seem to think that they're dictations as to what is evil and what is ok and therefore what I can and can't do with my systems are, I just hate thinking for myself.

I'm looking forward to building XFree 4.4 tonight, so if everyone who thinks XFree is the devil at the moment please stop reading the release notes so I can, thanks.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[mehaiku]

"why doesn't the XFree group revert ot the old one?"

Let's not please. Have you seen how fast the latest Linux 2.6.3 kernel is? Now imagine combining that with the speed of the latest KDE 3.2.0. What ingredient is still missing? A forked, reworked, optimized Xserver perhaps? Please Xfree group, for the love of God, keep the license as it is.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[MoneyT]

Because as they say over and over, the old license didn't directly address binary only distributions. The new one does.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[Anonymous Coward]

If this were a lot of trouble over nothing, they would have backed off to a license they've _been_ releasing code under for years.

At this stage, I think it's mostly an issue of losing face.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[leereyno]

The problem is that this isn't a legal issue, its a political/ideological one. The fact that the FSF crowd coaches ideological arguments in legal terms doesn't mean there is a legal issue here.

The FSF doesn't like the new license and begins telling people that it is incompatible with the GPL. Does that mean they are right? Does the GPL mean whatever the FSF decides it means that week? Or, in a country governed by the rule of law, does it mean no more and no less that what it be proven to mean in court? I don't know about you, but I tend to believe the latter

More importantly, what exactly is the FSF supposed to do about people who don't agree with their current take and make use of Apache/XFree86-4.4 anyway? Are they going to sue them? Do they have the money, let alone the ability convince a court that the suit isn't frivilous? More importantly, can they afford the ill will that would result?

I personally don't understand why XFree considers this change so important, but neither do I see it as a harmful one. They are not attempting to make any changes to how anyone uses their code, only asking that they receive recognition for their work. Isn't that something that RMS has been whining about for years with his GNU/Linux nonsense? He "corrects" people for calling Linux Linux every chance he gets. In fact I read an article where the author claimed that RMS refused to give an interview unless the article used his preferred terminology.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Lee

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't agree more.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[mst76]

The FSF doesn't like the new license and begins telling people that it is incompatible with the GPL. Does that mean they are right?

I don't know, but from the FAQ it seems that The XFree86 Project Inc. agrees with the FSF here.

They are not attempting to make any changes to how anyone uses their code, only asking that they receive recognition for their work. Isn't that something that RMS has been whining about for years with his GNU/Linux nonsense? He "corrects" people for calling Linux Linux every chance he gets.

RMS can ask recognition from distributors, but he can't legally demand it. XFree86 just changed their license so that they can.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[mcc]

The FSF doesn't like the new license and begins telling people that it is incompatible with the GPL. Does that mean they are right? Does the GPL mean whatever the FSF decides it means that week?

Well, the FSF did a very good job of backing up their claim that it is incompatible with the GPL. They pointed to the exact sections where the incompatibility occurs. Most people, including a number of the major Linux distributions, seem to agree with the FSF on this interpretation.

The "this week" comment is misleading. The FSF has never changed their opinion on the correct interpretation of the GPL and has tried to make the implications of this interpretation as clear as possible from day one.

More importantly, what exactly is the FSF supposed to do about people who don't agree with their current take and make use of Apache/XFree86-4.4 anyway? Are they going to sue them?

If someone alters a GPL program such that the code is linked with code from an incompatible license, the copyright holder of that code is within their rights to order the distributor of the mixed code to stop. If that distributor does not stop, the copyright holder is within their rights to sue the distributor to make them stop.

If the FSF were the copyright holder, they probably would sue if they absolutely had to in order to ensure compliance with the GPL. The FSF does hold the copyright on many open source projects, so this is a possibility.

Do they have the money, let alone the ability convince a court that the suit isn't frivilous?

Actually, yes, the main function of the FSF is to serve as a central copyright repository for open source and trust fund for the legal defense of those copyrights.

More importantly, can they afford the ill will that would result?

Can the open source software community afford to exist in a manner in which licenses are addressed in a slapdash, "oh that's close enough" manner? Since the nature of Open Source is to coordinate input from many contributors, the exact manner in which the rights and licensing to that input is marshalled is of extreme importance. The rights framework for open source needs to be clear and solid.

Moreover, I'm not sure exactly how much ill will the FSF would garner for enforcing the requirement that if you redistribute GPLed code you follow the terms of the GPL, especially since, well, if the GPL isn't going to be complied with then why does it exist in the first place? The only ill will this would generate is among people who don't think anything should be GPLed ever, and they hate the FSF anyway, so what's the loss?

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[jellomizer]

Well there are problems with sticking to the old license is because it didn't clearly explain how the authors wanted people to use their software. RMS is just a Free Software extremist, although you should thank him for his contributions to the Free Software community, you cant think of him as some master of right and wrong, good and evil, and worthy and unworthy. From all I heard and read about him he seems to be a very polarized person where what is believes is right is the only truth while anyone who disagrees with his is evil. Sure he is a smart man but the smartest man can be wrong. RMS often fails to realize the most people need to make money to live and not live off a "Genus Grant" from colleges. What the XFree86 License just adds is the persons recognition to the projects in all distributions of it. So now when these people want to get an other job (that makes them money to live) They can reference their contribution to Xfree86 in their resume and they can back it up by showing their name in any distribution it comes with. I do feel sorry for you if you are grateful for a small percentage of people who alert you when they see something they think is wrong. It is to bad you cannot think for yourself.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[Anonymous Coward]

So what. The terms of the new XF86 license are less cumbersome than the GPL. The fact that it is ``GPL incompatible'' is the fault of the GPL not of XF86.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[calambrac]

yeah, so here's what we have to thank the FSF and RMS for protecting us from:

Version 1.1 of XFree86 Project License.

Copyright (C) 1994-2004 The XFree86 Project, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicence, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions, and the following disclaimer.
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.
4. Except as contained in this notice, the name of The XFree86 Project, Inc shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization from The XFree86 Project, Inc.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE XFREE86 PROJECT, INC OR ITS CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

come on, this is the great threat to freedom? you have to include a line of text acknowldeging XFree86 where you already acknowledge other people? please. let's focus on something that matters.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[flossie]

Here's the deal.. if the new license isn't such a big deal, why doesn't the XFree group revert ot the old one?

Perhaps it is a big deal after all. Pure speculation, but it is possible that incompatability with the GPL is a deliberate attempt to prevent future changes to Xlib from being used by the freedesktop.org project now that they have packaged the library separately. I don't really see what useful purpose that would serve, but maybe things just got very, very bitter between the various personalities involved.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[k_head]

Nice troll congratulations. You got modded up too, nice job.

"The FSF doesn't like the new license and begins telling people that it is incompatible with the GPL. Does that mean they are right? "

Yes. Even the X people agree, so the the openbsd people.

"Does the GPL mean whatever the FSF decides it means that week? "

Nice troll, I'll give you a 9 for this. You will actually fool people for thinking that this has something to do with changes to the GPL. Of course you knwo that's not the case but a briliant use of misdirection.

"Or, in a country governed by the rule of law, does it mean no more and no less that what it be proven to mean in court? I don't know about you, but I tend to believe the latter"

Another brilliant misdirection. You know full well this nothing to do with the law. Another 9.

"More importantly, what exactly is the FSF supThe law which so venerate so much gives the FSF the right to sue people who violate their license. I doubt it will come to that but the FSF has the right to sue and they have shown willingness in the past to sue.

"Do they have the money"

Yes they do. They also have the ability to raise funds if they need it.

"let alone the ability convince a court that the suit isn't frivilous?"

Easy. Show the license, show where the license has been breached, collect damages. If the license is deemed void amend the suit to one of copyright violations and collect even more money.

"More importantly, can they afford the ill will that would result?"

The people who already hate them (you, MS, SCO etc) will continue to hate them no matter what. The OSS community will hail as heroes for enforcing the GPL.

"I personally don't understand why XFree considers this change so important, but neither do I see it as a harmful one"

They can do whatever they want. If the FSF says it's incompatible with the GPL then the distros won't include it. Every action has consequences.

"Isn't that something that RMS has been whining about for years with his GNU/Linux nonsense? He "corrects" people for calling Linux Linux every chance he gets. In fact I read an article where the author claimed that RMS refused to give an interview unless the article used his preferred terminology."

Great touch. End your post with a personal attack on RMS. I think that got you the +5 more then anything else.

People should bookmark your post. One of the all time great trolls.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[Alan Cox]

ex-Free86 8)

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[Anonymous Coward]

Regarding RMS' complaint with Linux vs. GNU/Linux, if you are talking about the kernel only, then you are free to call it Linux.

If you are talking about the entire operating system, then he prefers GNU/Linux.

And has been brought up before, that can only get silly as we start adding on: GNU/Apache/XFree86/KDE/Gnome/Debian/Linux

Maybe we should adopt [F]OSS/Linux? That keeps it agnostic. Or maybe the whole argument, IMO, is just silly.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh Ohhh. He is not a fan of RMS I guess that means he is a troll. I bet if he replaced the RMS to Microsoft he/she will be labled insightful. You know what there are plenty of people who don't care for RMS too. I think the author of the parent here was trying point out the danger of clinging to a group for determing if he is right or not. I guess RMS told the moderators to mod that one down.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[azzy]

The reason the two are incompatible is the fault of the XF86 people, as they are the ones making the recent change that caused the incompatability. If all was fine, then GPL suddenly changed and expected others to change to accomodate it, then any incompatability would be the fault of the GPL.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[azzy]

I thought the new restriction required sme sort of advert of XF86 being used.. not advertising the name of everyone to have worked on it (though I could be wrong). If I am right, then Joe Bloggs can't point to anything new to show he worked on it. However he can, and could point at his copyright notices in the source code. No change is surely needed for that?

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[zhenlin]

Right. Like GPL compatibility.

This is like 4-clause BSD, which was also incompatible with the GPL.

The GPL does not require this crediting -- therefore, any licence that does is not compatible.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[calambrac]

XFree86 isn't claiming GPL compatibility. They say so in their FAQ. GPL compatibility is beside the point.

The point is, "What constitutes 'free as in freedom'?" Is it only the GPL? I don't know, maybe I was so wrapped up in jamming on the idea of open and available source code that I missed the memo. I think the BSD licenses are free, and not weak. I think any license that says, here, take it... sounds pretty free. But then, I'm young, and haven't spent years thinking of clever names like "copyleft".

After reading the actual license in contention, you have to admit that what they are asking for is hardly an infringement on the core principles of free software, esp. if you were okay with their previous license. The annoying part extends a request for credit to binary distributions, as has long been requested in the case of source code distributions, and then only if you're already extending credit to someone else, but it in no way hinders any of the privileges afforded by other 'free' software.

I mean, this is what distributions are justifying their decision to exclude XFree86 software on? They don't want to add a line of text giving credit where it's due? Other posters have suggested that there may be some politics involved; it sounds a lot more plausible, though I don't know any of the details of all that. In the meantime though, let's get another SCO story, or talk about how much Microsoft sucks, or maybe rap about Taco Bell vs. Taco Bueno. This seems pretty weak in comparison.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[10101001 10101001]

> Does the GPL mean whatever the FSF decides it means that week? Or, in a country governed by the rule of law, does it mean no more and no less that what it be proven to mean in court?

Fine, the FSF states that the GPL and such and such license are incompatible. Maybe you don't agree, and you're certainly allowed to go off and treat them as compatible. And if someone gets sued over it because of what you did, you'll be held responsible if they're proven to be incompatible along with anyone else who knew you included such and such licensed code with the GPL code. I'd personally rather side on caution, especially when what the FSF is saying doesn't sound like FUD. I don't need a court telling me using a stapler to commit murder is homicide.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[10101001 10101001]

> The point is, "What constitutes 'free as in freedom'?" Is it only the GPL?

Anything that fulfills the idea of the GPL, to prevent the proprietizing of a work, is free as in freedom. BSD is open, not free. It's a sad fact that Microsoft says they're against open source software. I guess it'd look bad if they said they were against freedom source software.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[gaj]

So let me get this straight:

The Free license is the one that restricts how you can make use of the code, the license that is NOT Free is the one that only demands that you acknowledge the original authors, but otherwise lets you do whatever you want with the code? (And don't play games with the word "use", either ... that whole GPLer pedantry about "use" vs. "distribute" don't play here.)

OK, cool. Now I'm straight on this.

<sigh>

I just don't have words to describe how stupid that is. Not saying that people shouldn't, if that is their goal, try to prevent "proprietizing of a work" (whatever that means). I personally avoid using any software I dont have the source to and the right to redistribute said software with fixes/changes it I choose. However, calling that "Free" and saying that BSD is not is simply double-plus ungood.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[Grievre]

Linux is a kernel, not an OS. Calling an entire
system "Linux" is just incorrect. GNU/Linux is a
specific term which signifies the combination of
the GNU system and the Linux kernel, however, it
is also incorrect, as many of the core components
of a linux-based system (sysvinit, lilo, fsck,
modutils/module-init-tools) are not part of the
GNU system, but neither are they part of "Linux".

A bare-bones linux-based system is
generally comprised of GNU libc, GNU bash, GNU
fileutils, sysvinit, module-init-tools, fsck,
LILO (or alternately, GRUB), some sort of
packaging system (optional), and Linux itself.

in some cases, most of those tools are replaced
by something like busybox, in which case the
system contains no strictly GNU programs at all.

What part of that can be considered the operating
system? If you go by what is required to make
programs work, then it's just the kernel, a shell
(whether it be ash, bash, csh...), and a glibc.

If the program doesn't use the shell, that's not
needed, but it might. If the program is
statically linked, it doesn't need glibc, but
most programs aren't.

If you say "I use linux", you are correct.
If you say "my machine runs linux", that's right.
If you say "linux is a better OS than windows",
you might realize that most of what makes the
system what you would consider an OS is not,
in fact, part of Linux.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[Grievre]

Example of misuse: if you were to do file /bin/bash, it would tell you that it was an ELF binary compiled for GNU/Linux. This is a blatant misuse, because a statically linked binary need not depend on anything other than the kernel, Linux, itself.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[Anonymous Coward]

When it comes to your mentality on what other people think... whatever...

The issue is when we are talking about freedom, we're talking about rights.

When it comes to the opposing side on why the GPL is considered "free", it is because it does give you the ability to do whatever you want with the code. But it also prohibits any ability to deny giving source code with published binaries. In that sense, the GPL protect liberties for everyone, and in that sense, it is truly free, because of the free-dom is enjoyed by all.

With BSD-without advertising, from the BSD distributor, they give you freedom, but the receiver of code can modify your freedoms with his redistributed code. This is anarchist freedom.

BSD-with advertisement, is not free, as it requires you to attribute an author, and it gets to the point at just linking. And because of it, it restricts your freedom to distribute unless you do so. As if copyright wasn't enough, they are creating a situation where their label is more important than your right to distribute. It's does put the BSD distributor directly in the position of restricting rights. So it is not free.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[stor]

I agree wholeheartedly.

It's like that dude's /. signature:

"Think of it as evolution in action"

I think this mess is the best thing to happen to X for a long time. FFS, David Dawes doesn't even use X: he switched to Windows years ago.

X really needed a shake-up and here it is. Woot.

Cheers
Stor

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[13Echo]

This is a funny post, but I feel that it is the truth. This license change is just what the community needed to take back X and rework it for more desktop-oriented improvements. The 4.4Pre is under the old license, and it is very usable. The numerous Freedesktop.org changes can, and are, being applied, and in the end there is going to be very few problems with this transition. I, personally, feel that this is a good thing for us.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[Anonymous Coward]

along those lines...
86FreeX?

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, black is white, white is black.

I've already reported you to the Ministry of Intellectual Honesty.

Expect a visit any second.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[ajs]

You have missed the point entirely.

No one is saying that this is a terrible imposition and we can't bear the weight of editing a text file.

What we're saying is that you're not ALLOWED by the GPL to derive from a GPLed work in such a way that would impose this restriction. What that means is that you cannot let GPLed code get anywhere near XFree86 4.4 in any way that could be considered derivation. This is a tragic departure from the X Window System's MIT-originated history of BSD-like open source licensing that dates back to the mid-80s.

Why? Because XFree felt they needed more credit? Frankly that's as bad as Stallman going around insisting that people call operating systems that use his tool-chain "GNU/whatever", and even Stallman has never stooped to enforcing that in a license.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[nmos]

"I mean, this is what distributions are justifying their decision to exclude XFree86 software on? "

The Distro vendors, FSF, RMS etc are NOT saying this license is not "Free" or that it is evil etc. What they are saying is that it is incompatable with the GPL and as a result they may not be able to distribute it without either breaking the law or throwing out other parts of their distro.

A completely seperate issue is weather advertising clauses like this are practical or reasonable in the long term but not even RMS (who is against these) has said that people should avoid using software that has such a clause.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[J053]

OK. Let's try an example.

I write the KillerApp. By $DEITY, it' so good that everyone (including Bill and Darl) want to include it in their system. I personally believe software should be free, so I release it under the GPL. This has the following consequences:

Bill, Darl, or anyone else can distribute the binary, as long as they also make the source available.

Anyone can modify the program and distribute their modifications as long as they also relaease it under the GPL. In this way, the KillerApp will always be free (as in speech) forever.

Had I released KillerApp under a BSD license, Bill or Darl could make a few changes to it and distribute the result under any terms they want - potntially making the new, improved KillerApp completely closed and proprietary. They might make megabucks by changing 10 lines of source code and selling the binary only. Is that fair to me, when I did most of the work originally? No - that's why I release under GPL.

The problem with the XFree86 1.1 license is that it imoses a requirement to give credit if someone chooses to distribute a binary build of their software. If, in fact, they explicitly exclude client programs linked to the XFree86 libraries, then I don't see a problem. If not, they are imposing a requirement on people who distribute my software (because, of course KillerApp links to libX.so) which I do not want to impose on them. That's why (unless the XFree86.org people explicitly state *in their license* that the "credits" clause does not apply to client programs) the new XFree86 license is incompatible with the GPL.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[Anonymous Coward]

come on, this is the great threat to freedom? you have to include a line of text acknowldeging XFree86 where you already acknowledge other people? please. let's focus on something that matters.

There are two problems with this (as you would have known if you read any articles about it), when both stem from your definition of derivative:
1-GPL incompatability might extend to each and every program that uses X libraries and/or code. That means that distributions can't disribute any GUI program with X 4.4
2-Practical - once again, depending on your definition of derivative, if distirbutions would want to distribute Xfree4.4 they would have to verify that each and every program uses X achknowledges the XFree86.

Since the Xfree86 guys have not defined derivative work at all, we have to go with FSF's definition. If Xfree86 wants to define derivative, they have to do so in their licensce, not a public statement.

There seem to be at least two options about this mess:
a-the Xfree86 guys wanted to create a licensce change, but aren't lawyers, so when they cobbled together a liscence it blew up in their face.
This situation is possibly salavageable if the Xfree86 guys sit with lawyers and change the licsence again.
b-the Xfree86 guys knew exactly the effect it would have, and wanted to screw GPL apps.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[calambrac]

Okay, here's another example. I write the KillerAppIncredibleInterface that extends your KillerApp into widespread use in GUIland. As I am completely faithful to the terms of the GPL, which you have released KillerApp under, you have complete and full credit given to you in the source code, which I readily give to anyone who asks.

Unfortunately (for you), my KAII proves so popular that people wind up forgetting all about the underlying program. Every time my KAII starts up, I display a huge splashscreen that says Powered By Calambracky Goodness, and say nothing at all about the fact that I depend entirely on you. Sure, all the people "in the know" know it, but I mean, come on. Linux now rules the desktop, and all Joe User knows is the RPM he just installed gives him a pretty GUI with Calambrac written all over it. So, my brand gets built on your work. This is going to be a huge issue as Linux crosses into the mainstream; I think XFree86 is just getting ahead of the game.

I also think that you're misinterpreting the fundamental issue with this new license. "Is not compatible with the GPL" here means that a piece of software could meet the requirements of the GPL and not satisfy the 1.1 requirements. If it were the other issue, that is, BSD-ness of the license, then the previous XFree86 licenses would have to have been chucked out, as well. In this instance, it is strictly that distributed binaries have to give props out to the XFree86 team if they give props at all, which potentially means that alot of people have to edit their splashscreens. And as of right now, XFree isn't even releasing client side stuff under this license, so that's not even an issue.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is GPL compatibility so important? Actual code-copying between free software projects is rare. You're still free to learn from, modify and redistribute modified versions of XFree86. Anyone making contributions to XFree86 who want those contributions to be copyable to GPL projects can do that.

From posts here, it seems that some people consider being GPL-incompatible unethical in and of itself.

If the XFree86 team both wants to get credited in binary distributions and wants their code to be usable by non-free entities, why shouldn't they have the right to do that?

If you're strongly against proprietary forks, what if it was a clash between two GPL-like, but incompatible licenses? Particularly if both were almost equally popular? Now reconsider the situation where one was significantly more popular - would you be willing to argue "you should use it because everyone else does"?

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[Anonymous Coward]

And to elaborate and illustrate that code copying isn't such a crucial need, consider that the BSDs do just fine without copying GPLd code into BSD-licensed binaries. GPLd code is included in the distribution, but that's entirely permitted.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[kelnos]

Had I released KillerApp under a BSD license, Bill or Darl could make a few changes to it and distribute the result under any terms they want - potntially making the new, improved KillerApp completely closed and proprietary. They might make megabucks by changing 10 lines of source code and selling the binary only. Is that fair to me, when I did most of the work originally? No - that's why I release under GPL.

that's fine - and that represents a _personal choice_ made by you. you are forcing the code to be perpetually free, but you are not giving as much freedom to others as you think. sure, they have the freedom to mess with it, modify it, re-release it, etc. but you aren't giving them the freedom to repackage it as they please if that manner is proprietary and source-code-less.

and on that, i agree. i personally don't want MS/SCO/(insert evil corporation of the week) taking my hard work, packaging it in a black box, and selling it for who knows how much. but this has nothing to do with 'freedom'. at least not freedom for _real people_.

information does not 'want' to be free. it just is. it has no feelings, no emotion, no desires. it doesn't 'care' if it's free. _people_ care, because the level of freedom determines how free they are to use/modify/redistribute the code.

The problem with the XFree86 1.1 license is that it imoses a requirement to give credit if someone chooses to distribute a binary build of their software.

how is that a problem? you're ok with requiring that your source code be distributed along with binaries of your software, but you think it's too much require that others give credit where it's due? that's reeks of hypocrisy.

If, in fact, they explicitly exclude client programs linked to the XFree86 libraries, then I don't see a problem.

they don't need to 'excplicitly exclude' the X libraries. they just need to not license them under their new license, which is what they've done. granted, i believe the exact wording was that they've "deferred" a decision to relicense the core X libs until later. regardless, i believe there's an implementation of libX11 maintained by freedesktop.org. if the xfree86 maintainers choose to relicense _their_ X11 libraries with the new license, binary distributors should be able to 'get around' the advertising clause by linking against the freedesktop xlibs, as long as they remain binary-compatible. (i presume they can do this, but IANAL.) personally, i'd like to see a shift toward something like XCB, but that's something that's a bit of a ways away i'm sure.

the fact of the matter is that the new xfree86 license is more free than most other licenses out there, including the GPL, when you consider giving _actual people_ the freedom to do what they wish with the code. personally, i'd only license my stuff under the GPL. i'm too much of a control freak to consider something like this new xfree86 license, or bsd, or ($DEITY forbid) public domain. but, unlike others, i'm not going to knock those that are more selfless than i am and will license their code under terms less restrictive than the GPL.

on a side note, given RMS's constant desire for attribution of work (example: "it's GNU/Linux, not Linux"), i'm utterly confused as to why the GPL doesn't contain something of an advertising clause.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[calambrac]

No. What they're saying is that all the software they use that has been produced with the GPL in mind will not be compatible with the new clause in the 1.1 license. Which, yeah, sucks. But nobody has to throw anything out, nobody has to break the law. They just have to add a line of text to any splashscreens that thank other third parties without mentioning XFree86.

So the advertising clause stuff isn't a separate issue, it's the whole (minor and blown way out of proportion) issue. It's a bit of a burden, but in the end, it isn't a big deal. Just a line of text...

And what do we get from it? People are talking about forking the project! Banishing XFree86 software! There's no way that demand for an action like that stems directly and exclusively from this little license change; there has to be some other major contributing factor(s). Like I said before, I really don't know the details of all that, but I know there are already alternative x servers out there...

Anyways, rather than give us all this kruft about how the new license is dangerous in the eyes of the free, just say you think the software is bloated and ugly, and while it was okay to use while we didn't have to say thanks, now that we have to rewrite some splashes we'll move on. But now that we've noticed there's nobody ready to move to, we'll just bitch and hope you change your mind.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[Anonymous Coward]

From all I heard and read about him he seems to be a very polarized person where what is believes is right is the only truth while anyone who disagrees with his is evil.

Don't take this the wrong way, but instead of hearing and reading about RMS why don't you read (or hear) what he actually says himself. You'll find he's nothing like the charactature painted by Slashdot and any extreme polarity of his views are justified and reasoned.

TBH, I'm getting sick and tired of the RMS character assassination on /. and when reasonable people such as yourself start falling for the propoganda then it's a real worry.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[geminidomino]

Ok, so this is /. and I fully expect to be modded -250 "Troll", but what the hell.

Let's try another example:

I write UberSnazzyDVDBackup software for Linux[0] (Linux could REALLY use this at this point, but that's another rant) and I release it under the FreeBSD license. Microsoft grabs the code, slaps a few WinAPI calls into it, and introduces it as the newest preloaded bloat in Windows 2021, codenamed "tinydick". I get a font-size 4 line in help/about that says "based on software by Me" Unpleasant, sure. Fair? Definitely. It was my decision to say anyone could use my code for whatever they want for the price of acknowledgement.

But it doesn't stop there. My code is still out there, so a smarmy-yet-brilliant third-grader in Severnaya Zemlya takes my code, wraps it up in pretty state-of-the-art ncurses, and releases it under the GPL. Little Igor is suddenly the elected King of All Geeks because everyone loves "his" dvd backup software. He gets a loud and annoying following on "colonsplat(:*)". And I still get my attribution for writing the code.

THAT is "free as in libre" software. Anyone can take the code and do anything they want with it. Free is NOT "You can use this for whatever you want, provided that what you want to do is done OUR way." Logically, the GPL is very little different than requiring "K&R"-style braces in licensed code.

"Do it our way, and you'll be free" isn't freedom, it's cult-talk.


[0]No, I will NOT call it GNU/Linux. Sure, most (if not all) Linux distros come with GNU tools, but strictly speaking, the OS is a kernel. The GNU tools only add functionality.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[dvdeug]

THAT is "free as in libre" software. Anyone can take the code and do anything they want with it.

Except, of course, not acknowledging you. Just like you can do anything you want with GPL software as long as you distribute the source and don't change the license. If you want to whine about being uber-free, join OpenBSD and NetBSD in going to the 2-term BSD license or just place it in the public domain.

strictly speaking, the OS is a kernel.

All those boxes on store shelves labeled FooOS include a heck of a lot more then just a kernel. Likewise, the Portable Operating System standard (POSIX) didn't standardized system calls, it standardized a programming interface for C (provided under Linux by GNU Libc) and a set of utilities (again, mostly provided under Linux by GNU). I have never seen operating system used to mean a kernel except in these naming debates.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[geminidomino]

If you want to whine about being uber-free, join OpenBSD and NetBSD in going to the 2-term BSD license or just place it in the public domain.

So by your logic, saying "This software is free, as long as you give credit where it is due via a copyright notice" is the logical equivalent of "This software is free, as long as you release it the way WE tell you to?"

That doesn't hold water. The FreeBSD license (Like the OpenBSD and NetBSD licenses you mentioned) allow code released under that license to be released under ANOTHER license (including the GPL). The GPL does NOT allow you to release under ANYTHING but the GPL. In that sense, GPL'ed software is the LEAST "free as in libre." without being closed-source/proprietary.

those boxes on store shelves labeled FooOS include a heck of a lot more then just a kernel.

Yeah, and Windows includes things like "Notepad", "Paintbrush" (or whatever its called now), IE, and "Sign up for MSN". None of that is part of the OS, despite what Microsoft may claim. But you are right, they are bundled because they ARE needed, by the user, not by the OS. In CompSci, an OS refers to just what's needed to run the system, though granted an OS is kind of useless without some kind of application layer for users.

Re:So they stick to the new license...

[dvdeug]

So by your logic, saying "This software is free, as long as you give credit where it is due via a copyright notice" is the logical equivalent of "This software is free, as long as you release it the way WE tell you to?"

You were asking for more than a copyright notice; you were asking for recognition in the help file. And yes, you are demanding certain things about the way people edit and distribute the software. Your very statement is inflammatory. The FreeBSD license demands somethings about how you release your software, as does the Artistic license and the GPL.

The FreeBSD license (Like the OpenBSD and NetBSD licenses you mentioned) allow code released under that license to be released under ANOTHER license (including the GPL).

Certain licenses; not ones that demand that all license text to the software be in French, for example.

In that sense, GPL'ed software is the LEAST "free as in libre."

So a license that demanded that you only distribute patches and that you provide Sun the unlimited right to use your patches as they see fit would be more free, because you can slap an advertising clause along the side?

In CompSci, an OS refers to just what's needed to run the system,

So now it's more than a kernel. FOLDOC (the Free Online Dictionary of Computing) claims that a OS "presents a default interface to the user when no application program is running", which would on most Linux systems mean that Bash is running.

As a technical term in some branches of computer science, the Windows operating system doesn't include Notepad. But I haven't seen much objection to the name Mac OS X, even though the "OS" is clearly Darwin. The truth is, even computer scientists talk about Mac OS X and Debian and Red Hat as operating systems, and the rest of the world has no hesitation to calling everything that ships on the CD's labeled Operating System part of the operating system.

What???

[Azureflare]

What do you mean? How will it be the downfall of linux? Some people don't like the way a project is going, so they start a fork with the same codebase. People choose the best of the two forks, and then most people go to the new fork.

Sure, it seems bad while it's happening, but in the end you get a better product. Often projects get way too political and forking is a way to bypass that bureaucratic nightmare.

Re:What???

[Rick Zeman]

What do you mean? How will it be the downfall of linux? Some people don't like the way a project is going, so they start a fork with the same codebase. People choose the best of the two forks, and then most people go to the new fork.
Sure, it seems bad while it's happening, but in the end you get a better product. Often projects get way too political and forking is a way to bypass that bureaucratic nightmare.

Do you get a better product? Maybe...BUT, and this a big but, what about the products that have to choose which fork to follow when they've diverged far enough to be incompatible? Which version of X am I going to write GeeWhizMaGraph to use? These forks are even worse overall than distro fragmentation looking at linux at a macro level.
Whoever modded my original post as flamebait can bite me. Get a clue.

Re:What???

[pe1rxq]

The nice thing about X is that it doesn't matter for your app which server is runngin...
Its called a 'standard' and its a nice thing to have.

The only thing you will have to choose is the library you compile your app against. Very vew apps use the xlibs directly. And even then the various forks of xlib are still compatible.

Jeroen

Re:What???

[MoneyT]

But what happens when they fork the standards? Maybe a bunch of developers don't like the standards anymore. ANd who decides on these stnadards anyway?

Re:What???

[rch2]

It won't be the downfull of Linux for servers, but it would be yet another obstacle for any serious consideration of Linux as desktop platform. You already can't use more advanced programming toolkits if because of KDE/Gnome differences. Add different X versions here, what you would have left? ASCII "art" for geeks :/ ? Linux already have a plenty of problems with complete support for new videocard features, do you think hardware vendors would be happy spending their money writing/debugging drivers for different implementations when total market share is few percents only?
I can only hope that GPL zealots will be able to come to agreement with XFree folks, othewise Linux desktop looks as a dead end indeed.

Re:What???

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying these forks are worrying because if they were doing them in a way different than they are now, they could potentially be bad?

Re:What???

[toroko_nomura]

I would like to mod you down as a troll or as flamebait. giggle.

Re:What???

[FooBarWidget]

The X Consortium decides the standard protocol. It has always been like this.

Re:What???

[Azureflare]

I agree your original post didn't deserve a flamebait rating. However, I will say I don't believe that forks will cause fragmentation; in fact, I think different distros contribute to the versatility of linux. That's my own opinion, and you're entitled to your own =)

I'm not so sure incompatibility issues are a problem with forks, because most programmers try to get people to use their fork, and they won't intentionally break stuff. This is true even when you are making a new version of an application.

Of course, there IS a difference between forking and using a different prog for the graphical display; it would upset a lot of things if something other than X was used as a desktop; but if that alternative was close to X, then all it would take is some rewrites and dep changes (OK so it would be more complicated, but not impossible) and then everything would be fine after that change.

As you point out, some of what happens, re. forking is destructive, but it is also very constructive (i.e. competition) and I don't think it means linux will die.

I don't know if Xfree86 is completely impossible to fix at this point; I hope the Xfree team aren't intentionally writing their license to cause problems with GPL, but if they are, then a fork with the xfree codebase prior to the license change won't cause major compatibility issues because it's basically 4.4 before the 4.4 license. I'm not exactly sure when the new license takes effect or which codebase the fork can start from; I'm not terribly familiar with the project. I'm sure there are many others here who are posting/have posted on this subject.

Re:What???

[Rick Zeman]

I agree your original post didn't deserve a flamebait rating. However, I will say I don't believe that forks will cause fragmentation; in fact, I think different distros contribute to the versatility of linux. That's my own opinion, and you're entitled to your own =)

I agree with you with the caveat that there could be too much of a good thing, especially when different distros do the same things in different manners. Yeah, the LSB tried to address that in part, but we see what's happened with that. Yes, having the One True Distribution wouldn't be a good thing, but I think enough distros to count on one hand wouldn't be too many nor too few (personally, I have Mandrake here).

I'm not so sure incompatibility issues are a problem with forks, because most programmers try to get people to use their fork, and they won't intentionally break stuff. This is true even when you are making a new version of an application.

Of course, there IS a difference between forking and using a different prog for the graphical display; it would upset a lot of things if something other than X was used as a desktop; but if that alternative was close to X, then all it would take is some rewrites and dep changes (OK so it would be more complicated, but not impossible) and then everything would be fine after that change.

To me, that gets to the "well, Redhat uses this, SUSE that, Mandrake this...." etc. That kind of fragmentation is not good. Choice is good. Too much choice isn't.
As you point out, some of what happens, re. forking is destructive, but it is also very constructive (i.e. competition) and I don't think it means linux will die.

Ah, I didn't say die; I said "downfall." This a 'neath the hood/administrative commentary along the lines of the CUPS commentary by ESR. Linux ain't gonna make it out of geekdom until people get on the same page. Or at least in the same chapter. It won't die...but it won't mature.

Re:What???

[Metasquares]

If a bunch of developers decide to stop using the standards, they're going to run into all sorts of issues with "their" X not running apps that the "official" X can run. Strictly from a user's point of view, I'm not going to use a version of X that can't run any of my applications, no matter how many bells and whistles the server itself has, when there's a perfectly good version of X that can run those apps.

Re:What???

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like forking a project with quality developers is a snap. If it was that easy we wouldn't be discussing this. The stupid michael may say that xfree developers have to think about it, but finding developers ready to work with is not easy.

Re:What???

[Anonymous Coward]

If a bunch of developers decide to stop using the standards, they're going to run into all sorts of issues with "their" X not running apps that the "official" X can run. Strictly from a user's point of view, I'm not going to use a version of X that can't run any of my applications, no matter how many bells and whistles the server itself has, when there's a perfectly good version of X that can run those apps.

Please state at least three specific instances of this happening with any of the myriad of X servers/client applications available that conform to the X11R6 specification.

Aarrr...

[wesman83]

the GPL be a harsh mistress....

Lets make it as complex as possible for everyone

[microbox]

It's apparent that IP laws are more and more important to people who job is to write software.

"this might beonly way to get it?"

[Anonymous Coward]

won't be able to get it at all soon..

It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[Sheetrock]

The average person is greatly confused by the myriad issues involved with X, such as fonts, the third mouse wheel, TV-Out, printing, and the jillion interfaces available via desktop shells (for which there is no analogue in the Windows world).

Maybe a simpler and GPLed implementation is in order. There's got to be a bunch of tweaks for speed available for the X86 platform that would be possible in something not intended to run in safe mode all the time.

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[David McBride]

Y-Windows as recently covered on /. is such a GPLed redesign.

However, right at the moment x86-specific speed tweaks are less important than a smarter deisgn that works better irrespective of the platform you're running on.

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[temojen]

The average person is greatly confused by the myriad issues involved with X, such as fonts,

The average person doesn't need to know about xfs, or font dirs etc. Their distribution vendor takes care of this.

the third mouse wheel,

Again, the distribution vendor takes care of this.

printing

Printing is not an X issue, for the same reason that embroidering is not. It's a completely different medium.

and the jillion interfaces available via desktop shells (for which there is no analogue in the Windows world)

Again, the average user does not need to know about this. The distribution vendor chooses a default, and if the user has a reason to prefer a different one (which implies they already know about them), they may select a different environment. KDE software runs in GNOME, and vice-versa, and motif/CDE/XLib, etc software still runs in either, or neither, or twm, fvwm, etc.

there's got to be a bunch of tweaks for speed available for the X86 platform

XFree86 runs on a lot more platforms than just x86, which is a good thing now that 64 bit commmodity CPUs are coming out. Even AMD64 is likely to break those optimizations.

something not intended to run in safe mode all the time.

What does "safe mode" have to do with XFree86? Most of the users are on UNIX-like systems (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc). If you want to run an X Server on Windows 95, you're free to try one of the commercial implementations.

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[Brandybuck]

Maybe a simpler and GPLed implementation is in order.

Simpler. That means none of the complex stuff that confuses newbies. If you need TV-out, screw you. If you need printing, screw you. If you need that third mouse wheel, screw you. Truetype only, so go away you smelly unwashed Type1 font user!

GPLed implementation. If you think the current license controversy is worrisome, wait until you get X libraries under the GPL! NOTHING can be an X application unless it's under the GPL, because the GPL is not compatible with anything but itself. That means no Blackbox (and most of its derivatives). No KWin or Kicker for KDE. Nothing that's under the Artistic, BSD, MIT, MPL, etc. licenses will be allowed. If you can't understand why this is a problem, stop drinking the FSF Kool-Aid and wake up!

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[Kymermosst]

If you want to run an X Server on Windows 95, you're free to try one of the commercial implementations.

Or use the one from Cygwin. I use it anytime I am forced to use Windows and want to use X11 apps or use my Linux box remotely. It works well.

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[TheRaven64]

Printing is not an X issue, for the same reason that embroidering is not. It's a completely different medium.

Perhaps you're not aware of the x.org XPrint specification?

One of the reasons printing from graphical programs is often better on Windows, or the Mac (or NeXT, or NeWS, or ...) is that on these platforms you use exactly the same drawing functions to draw to the screen as you do to draw to the paper (GDI on Windows, PDF on the Mac, PS on NeXT and NeWS). Printing is very much an X issue.

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[TheRealSlimShady]

the third mouse wheel

Holy hell man, my mouse only has one wheel - I can't see where they'd put the other two...

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are so wrong. I've never had a working xserver in Debian. I've always had to tweak the xf86config myself. Lately that's been better due to knoppix (I steal theirs).

It is my opinion that this should have been dealt with ages ago. Maybe with this knife to our throats, can we get rid of all the crap, just like with mozilla.

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Simpler. That means none of the complex stuff that confuses newbies. If you need TV-out, screw you. If you need printing, screw you. If you need that third mouse wheel, screw you. Truetype only, so go away you smelly unwashed Type1 font user!"

Nice strawman troll.

Simple != feature-reduced. Noone really thinks all those computers in your average car these days have less features than the old carburator, but the user gets all the functionality and none of the complexity is exposed to the user.

A windowing system should be the same -- simple to the user, but very rich underneath

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[mj01nir]

Holy hell man, my mouse only has one wheel - I can't see where they'd put the other two...

Why, the bottom, of course.

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[10101001 10101001]

>>something not intended to run in safe mode all the time.

>What does "safe mode" have to do with XFree86?

Nothing really, but having XFree86 give you an option to run the Xserver as non-root (something I really would like to see) and giving an option to use vga/vesa if there is a problem wouldn't be bad ideas.

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

the third mouse wheel,
Again, the distribution vendor takes care of this.

Or, in reality-land, the distribution vendor only half-assedly takes care of this. I've never seen a linux distribution where, on a fresh install, the mouse wheel worked as expected in each app, much less the *%$#!? backspace/delete keys.

I am fucking sick and tired of having ^H or ^? appear on a modern PC because they still worry about supporting some extinct dinosaur machine.
Clue to Redhat and others: if you're going to compile up an i386 version of everything, perhaps you could go ahead and assume the machine it's going to be installed on isn't using a VT100 terminal.

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[Ender Ryan]

Yeah, but, substitute LGPL for GPL and then it would all be fine(well, for the majority of users and developers).

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

NOTHING can be an X application unless it's under the GPL, because the GPL is not compatible with anything but itself. That means no Blackbox (and most of its derivatives). No KWin or Kicker for KDE. Nothing that's under the Artistic, BSD, MIT, MPL, etc. licenses will be allowed. If you can't understand why this is a problem, stop drinking the FSF Kool-Aid and wake up!

BZZT, sorry, you lose. The GPL is compatible with many licenses, in particular, many of those you mention.

I agree that a GPLed X server would be a bad idea, but because there are many applications that are offered under GPL-incompatible licenses, not because everything is incompatible with the GPL. The vast majority of Free Software is compatible with the GPL.

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[Brandybuck]

You've got it backwards. There are many licenses that are compatible with the GPL, but the GPL is not in turn compatible with those licenses. In fact, the GPL is compatible ONLY with itself. By design.

Let's take just one license as an example, the MIT license. It is compatible with the GPL, because you can include MIT code in a GPL project and distribute the whole under the GPL. But you CANNOT do the reverse. You cannot include GPL code in an MIT licensed project and distribute the whole under the MIT license. No way, no how. GPL compatibility is a one way street.

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[ComputerSlicer23]

Two points. First, X at least on a stock Linux kernel, can't run as a non-root user. There for a variety of reasons.

From the simple, it needs acess to raw hardware, and standard users don't get that.

To the slightly less obvious: if you use XDM you have a chicken and the egg problem? You have to log into the screen to know what it is running as, but you have to have it running as a specific user to run.

At some point, when some of the security features in the kernel finally get all kinds of advanced features for limiting capabilities by program, by user, by time of day, but the position of the sun, the moon, and the stars, this will be a solved problem for all programs under Linux (after you do some assine amount of configuration, or use the default config the distro you use has). Then you'll be able to say that X runs as user foo, and foo has the ability to access specific pieces of hardware like user root, has the ability to su like root does, and has what other priveledge stuff that you need to run an X server.

Finally, in terms of "vga/vesa" stuff, what do you mean? Every piece of hardware I had runs correctly, and it's easy to configure it so it does just that. I've got config for a stock crappy VGA driver in my XF86Config file that redhat generated for me. If I stick a crappy card 10 year old VGA card in there, I'm assuming it'll run. If not, it'll die gracefully (at least under redhat), and tell me what to do (run the configuration tool).

Kirby

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh fonts are freaking easy.

Make a directory in your home directory called .fonts

The command:

mkdir ~/.fonts

Now unzip or otherwise unpackage your fonts you want to use. Copy the .ttf files to the ~/.fonts directory.

The command:

cp *.ttf ~/.fonts

Now your fonts are installed.

This is due to the xft font system added into XFree86 by some infamous guy that is now working in freedesktop.org after getting kicked out of XFree86.

Linux is beginning to get VERY VERY easy to use, but it's all new technology.

You have GStreamer to create a streaming media framework that apps can tap into to create nice multimedia displays without having to hack away at their code.

We have hotplugging and the udev and sysfs systems now for dealing with hardware configurations with kernel 2.6 and make things truly plugnplay.

Right now on my laptop I have it set up were I can plug in any usb device and it gets detected, the module for the device gets installed, and the proper /dev/ nodes are created automaticly.

I don't have to mess around with modules.conf no more, I don't have to know the module for anything any more, and I don't have to worry about weither or not a proper dev node is present.

ACPI is mostly working. I can control the speed of my proccessor simply by "echo -n (speed in khz) > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_setsp eed

The main thing why these don't work for the average user is simply because they are brand new technologies. But they are very easy to use once you get them set up.

Once they mature and get integrated into Linux then the only drivers you would have to worry about are propriatory ones.

The second reason that it doesn't work yet for the average person is because XFree86 lacks the ability to keep up with the developement pace of the rest of Linux and free software and doesn't incorporate any of the framework to deal with new stuff. (you need a GUI app don't you? After all using the echo command is TOO difficult)

At the same time they kick out one of the more innovative members of the core group and then change liscences to make sure they get more recognition. While at the same time stagnating the developement.

AFter all? Who the hell using Linux doesn't know about XFree86? Anybody who doesn't know, wouldn't care in the first place.

That's ok. A little "FORK" in the butt does wonders. I mean look at GCC!

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[LoganEkz]

> Most of the users are on UNIX-like systems (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc). If you want to run an X Server on Windows 95, you're free to try one of the commercial implementations.


Or the free Cygwin/X.

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[Cee]

You've got it backwards. There are many licenses that are compatible with the GPL, but the GPL is not in turn compatible with those licenses. In fact, the GPL is compatible ONLY with itself. By design.

Sure, but still, you can link BSD-licensed code with a GPL-licensed library. Which was the point parent tried to make.

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[Brandybuck]

Sure, but still, you can link BSD-licensed code with a GPL-licensed library.

Only if the resulting executable is licensed under the GPL. Since the FSF considers dynamic linking to be derivation, I am FORBIDDEN to distribute any BSD licensed work that links to GPL libraries.

Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.

[dvdeug]

Since the FSF considers dynamic linking to be derivation, I am FORBIDDEN to distribute any BSD licensed work that links to GPL libraries.

That's nonsense. The GPL only requires that the work as a whole be licensed under the GPL. All it means is that your work as a whole will be licensed under the GPL; all you code treated seperately from the library will still be BSD.

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

The XF86 project is distributing the 4.4 code under only the new license.

Have any of the individual XF86 *contributors* come forward and said their portions of 4.4 may be used under the previous license at the user's option?

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

The "new license" ONLY covers code which is (C) The XFree86 Project, Inc.

A lot of stuff, eg. some video drivers, come (and came) under different licenses.

Re:Question

[polin8]

The only code that has changed license is the code Copyright Xfree86. Alan Cox, for example, refused to have his contributions under the new scheme. Individual contributors who retained copyright of their code can choose not to allow the new license. It doesn't solve the problem though.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry if this is dumb, but my understanding of the GPL is that no derivative work of GPLed software may be released under any licence other than GPL (hence 'viral')

-- so how can the licence of GPLed software change at all, ever?? I mean, a new version is obviously derivative of earlier versions.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

The GPL is a non-exclusive licence. This means the original copyright holder can still resease his code under another licence. The restrictions the GPL imposes applies only to those who did not write the code.
But I don't understand why you ask since XFree86 was never released under the GPL.

Re:Question

[ajv]

I am a contributor and I am happy for my portions of the code (the Matrox drivers and documentation) to be relicensed under the new license. I've already told IBM that, and XFree86.

Why?

Because the GPL does not suit many forms of development, and if you wanted *ANY* drivers at all, you have to get the documentation. The competition between chipset manufacturers is extremely fierce, and they don't let just anyone access to their code.

Matrox, for example, provide you with a binary BIOS blob to work with, and you can't get this unless you sign an NDA. If the GPL was out there, the blob would become infected. Viola, no Matrox driver.

The fervour of some to be *all* GPL is misplaced and wrong. The GPL is not the be and end all of licenses, nor is itself perfect. The fact that it is deliberately broken with respect to other software in itself a flaw.

This license change will affect only contributors who wish to submit their code as GPL'd code rather than under the XFree86 license. They can always contribute their work to the driverless freedesktop.org, or they can give up a bit of license purity and actually get some work done.

And people wonder why Microsoft is winning.

Re:Question

[dvdeug]

Because the GPL does not suit many forms of development,[...]

This is not about the GPL. Theo de Raadt, who dislikes the GPL with a passion, doesn't like this license. This license is more onerous in some directions than any license widely recognized as free, even the GPL which doesn't have any attribution requirements.

To the extent that it is about the GPL, Gnome, KDE and GNUStep are all GPLed programs that have been working with X for their entire existence, but suddenly XFree86 is the one that changed the rules.

And people wonder why Microsoft is winning.

To the extent that Microsoft is winning, it seems much more rational to explain by the fact that they have a lot more money than free software developers and more ability to drill on to one specific target. I wouldn't blame on the fact that many free software developers use a license that encourages people to work within free software instead of taking software proprietary.

Oh REALLY?!?!?

[ZuperDee]

It looks as if the XFree86 people have a short timespan to either rethink their license changes or be dropped from every/almost every Linux distribution in favor of a forked codebase.

Am I the only one here who thinks it is possible that license change or not, some distributions are getting ready to dump XFree86 in ANY case, due to the other problems it has, like the general arrogance of the core developers, and the lack of a truly open development community, which is largely their doing?

Seriously, I don't think the license change is the major reason, but simply the right occasion for dumping XFree86. Even if they were to revert the license change tomorrow, I for one would still favor seeing forks like Freedesktop.org's server make it into distros, because I believe the license change is only one of MANY indications that XFree86 has far deeper problems that I'm not so sure can be fixed so easily. Just like many organizations and projects in real life, the PEOPLE behind the project are the greatest asset, and I think the XFree86 core team has failed to recognize this. Unless the core team gets a total attitude makeover, I doubt this will ever change.

Re:Oh REALLY?!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one here who thinks it is possible that license change or not, some distributions are getting ready to dump XFree86 in ANY case, due to the other problems it has, like the general arrogance of the core developers, and the lack of a truly open development community, which is largely their doing?

Well, if that were case the distributions complaining about the licensing would be moving to alternatives to XFree, rather than simply choosing to remain with 4.3.

Re:Oh REALLY?!?!?

[calc]

They will be moving to the alternatives once they are actually ready. For example, the freedesktop.org xserver hasn't had an official release yet, and isn't ready for general use. From what one of the Debian X Maintainers told me Debian will be moving completely over to freedesktop.org packages once they are ready for use.

Re:Oh REALLY?!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

The developers aren't the problem. David Dawes and his BoD is.

It's sad ...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

We should, more than ever, show that we are a community, to show that we have similar goals and we are not going to spread living people on their own. If we don't show stability, people won't think that Free Software is more than just a hobby.
This license diversity just confuses people; and it's not really necesary, As long as it's free software, you shouldn't care.
Just use the GPL, if you think it's to protective, use the lesser, that is why it's there.

Re:It's sad ...

[Nugget]

This is, in effect, nothing more than saying "Everyone can get along just great if only you people would just agree with me."

RMS designed the GPL to be hard to work with. It seems a bit myopic to now act all surprised that it is working as designed and to try to blame everyone else for its inflexible nature.

That the GPL can't coexist with other licenses was a design goal of the GPL. It's unreasonable to be upset with deverlopers using other licenses for this fact which is beyond their control.

Re:It's sad ...

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, we can be upset with the developers for using "open source" licenses with stupid encumberments like the advertising requirement on XFree 4.4.

It would be a good time to point out here that the reason the GPL was designed to be inflexible was to discourage people from introducing encumberments like this one.

Re:It's sad ...

[Nugget]

The GPL is much more encumbered than the XFree license. Who are you to say which emcumberments should be allowed and which are "stupid"?

Either you believe that programmers should be free to license their code as they see fit, or you don't. It's not Freedom if the community is going to deny the legitimacy of licenses that RMS didn't write.

Re:It's sad ...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Well, RMS created the Free Software Movement, which predates the OpenSource movement, and all this other Free licenses ... So, i think that the licenses has to adapt to the GPL, not the GPL to other licenses ...; besides, if you Beleive in Free Software, there is no real reason to use a license other than the GPL.

Re:It's sad ...

[InfiniteWisdom]

You're free to release your code with a license saying you may only use the code while doing headstands. That doesn't mean anyone else has to accept it.

And I think the "encumberances" of the GPL basically do little more than to say that you can't take someone's code and take away the freedom that you had when you redistribute it.

Re:It's sad ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit, i hope someone meta-moderate this ...

The post is not troll, it's not interesting, and it has not been overrated. There is no need to moderat every single post, it was ok at 1.
I Got moded +1 interesting, then someone thought it was a bad thing, and moded me -1 overrated, and then someone came and put me down as troll???????
Please explain the troll part of this post because i just don't get it.
There are too much assholes with modpoints in their hands.
PLEASE, METAMODERATE, HELP SLASHDOT BE A BETTER PLACE.
BTW: SHouln'd we implement a different moding system, where you actually SEE who has modded you??.
I will protecto my karma this time, sory.

Re:It's sad ...

[Nugget]

The discussion right here on the page you are reading clearly demonstrates that in the minds of many people XFree86 should not have this freedom. I see more people who are distressed because XFree has chosen a license which is not the GPL than I see people who are distressed over the actual terms of the Xfree86 license. It seems that that choosing a non-GPL license is an untenable and damnable offense in the eyes of some who are now calling for the prejudicial abandonment of XFree86 for strictly dogmatic reasons.

It's one thing to not accept a license because headstands are uncomfortable. It's an entirely different and worse thing to denounce a developer for choosing a license that isn't the one you favor. I see far more of the latter going on here than I see the former.

Finally, The GPL does demand more than your vague perception of it appears to encompass. However, that's not really relevant to my point.

Re:It's sad ...

[Wavicle]

And I think the "encumberances" of the GPL basically do little more than to say that you can't take someone's code and take away the freedom that you had when you redistribute it.

Sure it does. It says you cannot even link to the GPL code without GPL'ing your code. You don't have to modify a single line of the GPL source code and *poof* you either GPL your source or you unlink. That sounds pretty encumbered to me.

Re:It's sad ...

[MooKore 2004]

Wrong. You don't have to GPL your code if your licence is GPL compatible. Thats Why LGPL and other licences can co-exist with the gpl.

Re:It's sad ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The GPL offers exactly the minimal set of restrictions that are absolutely necessary in order to ensure others do not try to later add restrictions to redistributions of the code. Because the sole reason for these restrictions is to prevent further restriction, they are viewed as justified, as a necessary evil.

The idea is that those who promote the GPL over other open source licenses believe that this is the only reasonable justification for encumberment.

Either you believe that programmers should be free to license their code as they see fit, or you don't.

This is a straw man. XF86's detractors are not saying that the XF86 project doesn't have the right to license their code as they see fit. XF86's detractors are saying that XF86 must license their code in certain ways if they wish for other people to actually use it.

Also, some of them are upset because they consider it wrong that XF86 waited until XF86 was accepted and used by everyone, then began adding encumberments many find unacceptable. This smacks of bait-and-switch and being upset about this is totally reasonable. Of course, it isn't the end of the world because the option of forking from XF86 4.3 is there, but it should be noted that that option is indeed exactly what the detractors are doing.

Re:It's sad ...

[Nugget]

It's hardly a strawman. It's a direct response to the original poster's statement: "Just use the GPL, if you think it's to protective, use the lesser, that is why it's there."

As to the rest, I've responded to your points elsewhere in this thread.

Re:It's sad ...

[gl4ss]

many people feel that it's stupid for xfree86 people to do this because for practicalitys sake most people can't start using it(4.4) 'right'. they knew it too, they knew that it would be an issue and would hinder it's adaptation, yet they chose to ignore that fact. it's little things like that why the distros are looking elsewhere for alternatives(and are likely to jump boat as soon as they can).

of course if they just want to keep(turn it back into) it as an academic research project then by all means changing the license this way is a great move(nah, even for that there would be better ways).

what you're supposed to do when you see somebody doing something that you think is very stupid? tell them that "YOU RULE!!! GO GO GO GO!!!"? or make a blunt statement that their actions don't seem to make sense?

gpl demands more, that is true, but more projects use it (and have chosen it) and gpl compatibility seems to be quite an issue!

Re:It's sad ...

[rsheridan6]

You're free to write code with any license you want, and you're equally free to let code with a license you don't like languish in disuse and obscurity. That's freedom.

Re:It's sad ...

[Heretik]

If I write a GPLed library, I DON'T WANT some selfish asshole of a developer linking against it to develop his proprietary application.

If said developer wants exclusive proprietary control over his code... he can write his code his f*king self.

Re:It's sad ...

[Brandybuck]

which predates the OpenSource movement, and all this other Free licenses

It predated the name "Open Source", but it did not predate all other Free and Open Source licenses. The BSD and MIT licenses are two that predated the GPL. In addition, the idea of Free Software predates the GPL by at least two decades, though it was RMS who first insisted on the capitalization of the term.

if you Beleive in Free Software, there is no real reason to use a license other than the GPL.

If you believe in Democracy, there is no real reason to vote for any but the Democrat Party candidate! Now be a good citizen and vote like I tell you to vote...

Re:It's sad ...

[Anonymous Coward]

over his code... he can write his code his f*king self.

He does write *his* code himself, he just uses yours as well. If you didn't want it used, you wouldn't have released it as OSS would you?

I think the GPL would be fine if it said that the GPL code you use must be redistributed, and open, but that your code that *you* write can be licensed anyway *you* want it.

Its not free source code if you demand payment *in any form* for it. That's why its not Free as in beer. And I think it should be - if I write free code, I want it to be like a gift to others.

Re:It's sad ...

[Wavicle]

In other words, the GPL is heavily encumbered. That was my point.

Re:It's sad ...

[Wavicle]

That is rather nebulous (what is the exact definition of GPL compatible?), but it points out that the GPL is very much encumbered, although it does try and strawman the argument.

Re:It's sad ...

[Anonymous Coward]

> It seems that that choosing a non-GPL license is an untenable and damnable offense

It seems that basic reading comprehension skills are unusually hard to acquire, too. The issue here is that a non-GPL-compatible license is being used, not that the entire license is not the GPL.

Re:It's sad ...

[antiMStroll]

The XFree86 team is completely free to change their license as they see fit and distro packagers have the same freedom to reject software based on a license they don't like. Both sides are right.

Re:It's sad ...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's one thing to not accept a license because headstands are uncomfortable

Nah, it's the squats that are killing me.

How so?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see linux being hurt by this, only XFree86.

In my opinion, the sooner Linux drops XF86, the better it will be for Linux.

uh, hehehe, yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

Major features include translucent windows...welcome to 2000.

How am I supposed to take something seriously when its biggest feature is something I've had on my Macs for years?

The last version of X?

[Ars-Fartsica]

This is the first version of X that many of its end packagers (linux distros, bsds, etc) have explicitly rejected. What will be the motivation to pursue further development that no one is using? This group just (xFree) 86'd themselves with petty sqaubbling. Thanks for the memories but I think its goodnight Vienna for XFree86.

Re:The last version of X?

[Anonymous Coward]

86'd themselves? What in the world does that mean?

Re:The last version of X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good talking, did you start implementing the alternative, or do you know bunch of people ready to work with the fork?

This is a very good example where organizations shouldn't go with the Linux assuming that it is free. Clearly GPL hurts Linux. Without X-Window Linux is not an alternative to Windows on the desktop at all.

Re:The last version of X?

[Ars-Fartsica]

Good talking, did you start implementing the alternative, or do you know bunch of people ready to work with the fork?

Freedsktop.org has been working on this for some time. (duh)

Re:The last version of X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fool, it's no where near done and may never be.

Re:The last version of X?

[Ars-Fartsica]

it's no where near done and may never be.

Blah, blah blah. Your 15 minute break is over, go back and man the fryer and then take out the trash.

Re: None, for users.

[plcurechax]

What other alternatives are there to Xfree?

There are not suitable alternatives for end-users on Linux and BSD on recent hardware. freedesktop.org is an experimental play-area for developers where exciting new features are currently being developed not mundane things like updated drivers for newer video cards (Radeon 9600, 3rd party 9200LE, newer Intel 845 series, etc.), not robust "production quality" software for end-users, Xouvert doesn't actual have any unique code of their own the last time I looked, and Y Window system is more an idea and a work in progress.

Hopeful about the post-X era

[Ars-Fartsica]

Can we get rid of a system that resolves all dependencies internally? (would like to finish a compile this year)

Can we get rid of the X11R6 subdir? (once again, stop thinking X is a world to itself)?

Just two suggestions for the post-XFree86 era.

Re:Hopeful about the post-X era

[plcurechax]

Can we get rid of a system that resolves all dependencies internally?

What, do you mean get rid of all the library files?

(would like to finish a compile this year)

Complex software is complex. Get a faster machine.

Can we get rid of the X11R6 subdir? (once again, stop thinking X is a world to itself)?

X11R6 name is derived from the old MIT X Windows Version 11 releases. It is not a XFree86-ism.

Re:Hopeful about the post-X era

[afidel]

Uhhh, moving those tools out of the X11R6 subdir would break anything that expects those files to be there. Besides it's part of the Linux Standard Base and therefore not likely to be changed after all of the work that went into LSB.

Re:Hopeful about the post-X era

[Ars-Fartsica]

Complex software is complex. Get a faster machine.

Do you even know what I am referring to in my original post?

X11R6 name is derived from the old MIT X Windows Version 11 releases. It is not a XFree86-ism.

Well, thats why I labelled my post the "post Xera". My point is that the entire /X11R6 subdis a groaning anachronism and sloppy design.

Re:Hopeful about the post-X era

[Ars-Fartsica]

Uhhh, moving those tools out of the X11R6 subdir would break anything that expects those files to be there. Besides it's part of the Linux Standard Base and therefore not likely to be changed after all of the work that went into LSB.

Well the LSB can be modified. Its not intended to encode sloppy practices and bad design. Just make some symlinks to honor the past and move on. As for "breaking everything"...this is ridiculous. The distro vendor should be able to resolve this change trivially even without a symlink.

Face it, the X file layout is broken!

Re:Hopeful about the post-X era

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually find it rather useful that all of the X11R6 binaries are later in my path than anything that I will type on the command line. For [very] old systems it made the command line much snappier. For new systems, it still prioritises my PATH in such a way that I'm less likely to start popping up [unwanted] windows when I'm using the command line.

Re:Hopeful about the post-X era

[Majix]

Can we get rid of the X11R6 subdir? (once again, stop thinking X is a world to itself)?

Yes. This is being done for the Freedesktop.org X server. See here for more information. And about time! Another thing is that the horrible imake system is being removed (I personally would like to see it taken out behind the barn and shot). Looks like these guys are serious about dragging X into the 21st century.

Re:Hopeful about the post-X era

[tesmako]

The X11R6 subdir makes a lot of sense, if you are on an X terminal then include X11R6/bin in your path, if you arent then dont. This cleans up the namespace nicely when the fantazillion programs that require X really cant be run anyway. I actually feel that one should divide up the directory tree more (or use Plan9-style tree overlaying). I really dont see the point of throwing everything together anyway.

Re:Hopeful about the post-X era

[afidel]

Wait, you think only things packaged by the distro reference a particular directory?!?! Tons of people probably have things that point to tools in the X11R6 directory structure. Besides X11 predates linux by quite a bit so bashing it at this point about style seems pointless.

Re:Hopeful about the post-X era

[Ars-Fartsica]

I still don't get the counterargs. We wouldn't accept /gnome or /kde or /mozilla but /X11R6 is acceptable??

Re:Hopeful about the post-X era

[Ars-Fartsica]

This cleans up the namespace nicely when the fantazillion programs that require X really cant be run anyway.

You do realize that this makes no sense, right? X programs will not run if there is no X server running. If you want to type 'xeyes' at the console prompt you should get the appropriate error message and leave it at that. Your premise is that xeyes should be in a special directory but mozilla shouldn't (???????).

Re:Hopeful about the post-X era

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, shouldn't those be /opt/gnome, /opt/kde, /opt/mozilla ?

Re:Hopeful about the post-X era

[TheLinuxSRC]

We wouldn't accept /gnome or /kde or /mozilla but /X11R6 is acceptable??

....and /opt/kde is OK along with /usr/lib/mozilla ?? Personally, I like KDE in it's own directory (not /usr/bin like RedHat/Fedora does) so that if I want to try the latest-greatest version I don't break my existing implementation. Same goes for X11R6. How bad would it suck to uninstall/reinstall everytime you wanted to try a beta/alpha/cvs version? Isn't it much more user friendly to just "mv X11R6 X11R6.old" and install the new to try it out? If it doesn't work, simply "mv X11R6.old X11R6" and you are fine again?

Just my $.02

Re:Hopeful about the post-X era

[aled]

Perhaps the time has come to do a step forward from the classical unix directory layout? It would be better to start planning a standard now for the change to take place for the next 5-10 years. It would be a big change but I think it may be need.

Re:Hopeful about the post-X era

[TheLinuxSRC]

I thought that was what the Linux Standards Base (I think that is right...LSB) is supposed to be doing. But then again, that seemed to have gone over like a lead balloon.

Re:Hopeful about the post-X era

[stor]

Uhhh, moving those tools out of the X11R6 subdir would break anything that expects those files to be there.

Have you heard of the wonderful Unix technology known as symlinks?

Cheers
Stor

It's Fresco

[kentyman]

Berlin was renamed Fresco quite a while ago, and has not changed names since.

Re:It's Fresco

[HoldmyCauls]

PicoGUI hasn't changed its name since its conception, either... what is this guy on about?

Debian avoiding the new release??

[niom]

XFree86 4.3 just got into Debian unstable. Debian won't arrive at avoiding 4.4 until eight or nine months from now.

Re:Debian avoiding the new release??

[moberry]

hehe, im still waiting patiently on kde 3.2

Re:Debian avoiding the new release??

[sewagemaster]

you might find this useful...
http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?Debian KDE

Re:Debian avoiding the new release??

[CBravo]

It will be another three years before it enters stable. I still have time :-).

Re:Debian avoiding the new release??

[dzym]

I'd like to see you do better with a bzip2 of patches 3 megs in size that XFree86 won't apply to their upstream code even though they fix some insane number of critical XF86 bugs.

Re:Debian avoiding the new release??

[Anonymous Coward]

the packaging time should not equal the actual development time.

thats a sign of ineffiency

Re:Debian avoiding the new release??

[calc]

I'm not going to upload KDE 3.2 to sid until KDE 3.2.1 is released. The KDE 3.2 release had so little testing done to it that they immediately released required interim fixes to kmail for it among other things like kwifi not even being compilable. There are already 10MB+ of diffs from KDE 3.2 -> KDE 3.2 BRANCH (3.2.1), 3.2 BRANCH is supposed to be just bug fixes so that should tell you 3.2 should be avoided. ;) You can always use the experimental (READ BUGGY UPSTREAM SOURCE) debs as mentioned on http://wiki.debian.net/DebianKDE.

Re:Debian avoiding the new release??

[calc]

Debian will probably switch to freedesktop.org packages much quicker than previous XFree86 packages due to upstream finally maintaining them properly. XFree86 was monolithic, freedesktop.org is not. XFree86 never cared about non-x86 architectures, it appears freedestkop.org will. XFree86 was a closed development model, freedesktop.org isn't...

Re:Debian avoiding the new release??

[calc]

Yes, XFree86.org was the ineffiency and has finally been removed from the picture.

Re:Debian avoiding the new release??

[cortana]

"Packaging"? Surely you jest?

Go and learn just how much Branden Robinson and the rest of the Debian X Strike Force contribute to XFree86 before you go mouthing off next time!

Re:Debian avoiding the new release??

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to see you do better with a bzip2 of patches 3 megs in size that XFree86 won't apply to their upstream code even though they fix some insane number of critical XF86 bugs.

Well, the people at Mandrake pulled it off. XFree 4.3 was in Mandrake 9.2 (about six months old).

Re:Debian avoiding the new release??

[Anonymous Coward]

By the time that Debian even considers 4.4, there will already be several forked alternatives and everyone else will have decided on a new standard. ;)

Re:Debian avoiding the new release??

[Anonymous Coward]

That's bogus. I found a small bug in XFree86 on Itanium and posted a bug report, the only stuff I included was the X log and a stack trace at the time it crashed.

Two days later, the bug was found and fixed.

Itanium *workstations* are not exactly a common platform. But the XFree86 mob was every bit as agile and responsive as, for example, the IA64 kernel folk.

Please don't go around making up stories just because it sounds nice. :(

Re:Debian avoiding the new release??

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, with the speed Debian keeps upgrading we'll be using hologram displays when Debian still keeps wondering whether to include XFree 4.4 or not.

Re:Debian avoiding the new release??

[fooishbar]

We've already avoided it. :) We're not shipping 4.4. It's a little misleading to claim we've just shipped 4.3. The baseline is 4.3.0, sure, but there are 110,000 lines of patches (approximately; I haven't had access to Branden's personal repository for a while now, so I can't check) on top of that. That's halfway to 4.4, basically. Most of it lies in drivers: SiS, ATI (mainly Radeon - support for newer cards, lots of random fixes), nVidia (random fixes), and more. Actually, I think it'd be closer to 120,000 now. -d, ex-X-co-maintainer

Re:Debian avoiding the new release??

[twener]

> among other things like kwifi not even being compilable

Did you complain about it before it was released?

Re:Debian avoiding the new release??

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

It's been released!

I've said it before and I'll say it again

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux will get nowhere in the consumer market for as long as any user-- anywhere-- has to be aware of the existence of the XF86Config file.

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

[Nasarius]

Have you ever tried Mandrake? I don't use it normally (I use LFS or Gentoo), but its automatic hardware configuration is amazing. Unfortunately, its package management system kinda sucks.

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

[MooKore 2004]

Maybe if you used REAL distributons, you would see that they automagically detected your hardware and screen resolution, with no need to be aware of it. Mandrake, SuSE, Lindows, Knoppix, Fedora and more don't make me aware of it, but the distros that do, such as Debian, Slackware, Gentoo are the ones that need to be fixed. Complain to them!

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

[MooKore 2004]

Have you ever tried urpmi? Its like emerge but without the compiling, I don't find that Mandrakes pakage system "kinda sucks" after discovering this tool!

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

[rodgerd]

I haven't had to diddle with the XF86 configs manually since about RedHat 7-ish. Perhaps you should try using a recent distribution some time.

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

[Anonymous Coward]

Distro's such as Gentoo, Slackware, and Debian are not meant to be drool proof. Saying they need to be "fixed" because you must know a bit about manual configuration would be like claiming that Win2k is not ready for Grandma.....it's not intended for Grandma and will probably never be ready.

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

[black mariah]

That's nice, unless you're using an Nvidia video card and you want it to actually USE its acceleration capabilities. It took me three weeks to get Nvidia's drivers properly installed because I have to have some obscure option enabled for it to work with my monitor.

Call this an issue with Nvidia's drivers if you want, but that's exactly the point.

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't need to be fixed. They appeal to a different audience than Mandrake, Knoppix, Fedora, etc.

So rather than complaining to a distribution that you don't like, use one that you do like.

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

[jejones]

What?! I took a computer over to a friend's to try to help diagnose problems he was having with his cable modem. I'd just installed Fedora Core 1 on it, but took a monitor other than the one I'd used (a 17" ViewSonic versus a 21" Hitachi), and /etc/inittab was set to init level 5. I was royally screwed.

I've since been told how to escape from that situation, but ideally, just as Linux looks for new hardware during boot, it should look for a new monitor, and reconfigure X to suit. (A monitor is hardware, right?)

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

[anthonyrcalgary]

That still isn't going to help you with, say, dual monitors, or other non-standard configurations.

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

[Anonymous Coward]

> but the distros that do, such as Debian, Slackware, Gentoo are the ones that need to be fixed.

That's like saying that cars with manual transmission need to be "fixed".

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux will get nowhere in the consumer market for as long as any user-- anywhere-- has to be aware of the existence of the XF86Config file.

the what?

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

[stor]

Which worls great if your monitor supports DDC.

If it doesn't, you may be firing up vi and entering refresh rates manually. Or trying every "Generic VGA Monitor" your ncurses-based X configurator has until you stumble across one that works.

I must admit I don't have a problem with the above: compared to what we had in the XFree86 3.x series, this is bliss.

I can't imagine my mum going to all that trouble though: you'd need to at least remain in some sort of generic graphics mode during the configuration and test. Not this "until (decent display) {run configurator && change something && startx}" song and dance.

Cheers
Stor

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

[geminidomino]

I can't speak for the others, but Slackware is created with stability in mind, not with coddling to the drooling masses. You can use the Micky Mouse distros if you want, or give them to Aunt Millie, but leave slackware alone!

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so Linux will not get anywhere on the desktop until Nvidia fixes their stuff?

And what does Nvidia have to do with Linux at all? I f you don't like their way of doing things, buy a different card.

Speaking of forks

[Gothmolly]

In Soviet Russia, the XFree86 Project forks YOU!

Pathetic

[Anonymous Coward]

From the wording, it seems that the XFree86 version 4.4 group probably went forward with the licensing changes thinking that "most people don't care about the license" and that they'll download v4.4 separately, which will cause v4.4 to gain momentum despite its license.

I urge you to boycott v4.4 even if you "don't care about the license", just on principle.

Re:Pathetic

[Anonymous Coward]

And you Sir are an uninformed idiot.

As someone who cares not about the license

[smartin]

Whats new in 4.4, the site seems to be /.ed. Can a Karma whore please post come release notes.

Re:As someone who cares not about the license

[plcurechax]

* Several stability issues with the support for the Intel 830M, 845G, 852G, 855M and 865G integrated graphics chipsets have been fixed. Some limitation related to the driver's use of the video BIOS remain, especially for some laptops.

* The nv driver for NVIDIA cards has been updated as follows:

* Support added to the nv driver for the GeForce FX 5700, which didn't work with XFree86 4.3.
* The driver now does a much better job of auto-detecting which connector of dual output cards the monitor is attached to, and this should reduce or eliminate the need for manual XF86Config overrides.
* The 2D acceleration for TNT and GeForce has been completely rewritten and its performance should be substantially improved.
* TNT and GeForce cards have new XvPutImage adapter which does scales YUV bit blits.

The SiS driver has seen major updates, including:
* Support for 661/741/760 and support for 330 (Xabre).
* Merged Framebuffer mode.
* Support for DVI, and much more.
* DRI for 300 series (300/305, 540, 630, 730) is supported again.

A new driver for several VIA integrated graphics chipsets has been added.

* The mouse driver has some support on Linux and FreeBSD for auto-detecting the device to use. This makes it unnecessary to supply this information in the XF86Config file in most cases.

* XFree86 4.4 supports IPv6, based on the code contributed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. to X.Org.

* The Mesa version used for OpenGL(R) 1.3 and DRI driver support has been updated to 5.0.2.

* FreeType 2 updated to version 2.1.4. ...

Re:As someone who cares not about the license

[ozric99]

Whats new in 4.4, the site seems to be /.ed. Can a Karma whore please post come release notes.

Come release? Try Nerve.com for those...

And XFree86 Inc. has shown to be willing to talk

[Anonymous Coward]

The XFree86 Inc. (that is their board) has shown to be willing to discuss actual issues and concerns. If you look at the first reply to RMS's message in the XFree86 Forum, it is from David Dawes of XFree86 and his willing ness to discuss concerns about the license change.

It is not clear why XFree86 has to modify their license to suit a Linux distribution, which is suppose to be a compilation of Free/Open Source Linux software, not a dictator of Open Source.

If these arm chair lawyers are so concerned about GPL, why don't they write a new X Window System from scratch, and release it for free/Free under the GPL.

Hurting DESKTOP linux?

[xanthines-R-yummy]

This may not hurt "real" linux users, but what about granny who's just getting into linux? How will the new liscensing issues affect distros like Lindows and Lycoris whose main target demographics are noobs and windows converts?

This isn't rhetorical! I'd really like to know!

Re:Hurting DESKTOP linux?

[Ice_Balrog]

Lindows, Licoris, etc will just not include XFree86 4.4. Granny won't even know that XFree86 4.4 even exists. Nobody other than maybe XFree86 itself will be really hurt.

Re:Hurting DESKTOP linux?

[xanthines-R-yummy]

All fine points, but I was wondering how it might affect usability/upgrades/performace enhancements/new features and stuff like that down the road.

Is poor old granny going to be tethered to her P4/Radeon forever? Well, I guess for her maybe! How about the liberal arts hippie little brother who doesn't know anything about computers except that he likes to play GTA:Vice City?

Re:Hurting DESKTOP linux?

[Ice_Balrog]

Is poor old granny going to be tethered to her P4/Radeon forever?

Not really, Xouvert (a XFree86 fork) or Xserver (a new x server from freedesktop.org) will just replace XFree86 soon. When they are ready, the distros will just switch to them in the background, and granny won't even notice.

And you realize...

[Karpe]

that by posting it on slashdot, you just ruined what might have been "the only way to get it for the moment", don't you?

But if we have to f'up the server right, how about linking to the release notes?

It won't hurt them.

[MooKore 2004]

It is KDE and Gnome that affect them, and they are both working hard to be freindly to them. Granny doesn't know about Xfree86, all she sees is the freindly K icon to launch her programs. XFree86 4.3 is already good enough, Lycoris and Lindows don't even use the latest versions (KDE 2.2 for Lycoris and KDE 3.0 for Lindows.

Re:It won't hurt them.

[jejones]

Eh? Elsewhere it's been said that drivers have to be rewritten for the freedesktop.org software, and I'm sure it has to be rewritten for Y. Graphics card makers are notorious for refusing to release the information required to allow open source drivers--suppose they refuse to write more than one version, and stick with XFree86? PCI Express will take over from AGP, if I read the chipset roadmap articles rightly just this morning...so if the manufacturers stick with providing binary-only drivers for XFree86, how will anyone, much less Granny, be able to use a free X?

Re:It won't hurt them.

[bluGill]

Manufactures will write their drivers for what is most popular. If Windows had 1% of the market you can bet that they wouldn't write drivers for MS. If there are 20 different products each with 4% of the market, manufactures would be forced to write for all 20. Do that math, those 20 different systems make up 80%, even if something else has the other 20% that 80% isn't ignorable.

As linux grows eventually drivers must be written if you want sales. Thats why you can get drivers for NVIDIA cards in linux already, the market is big enough that they can't ignore it. (But not big enough that they care about perfect drivers on the date the hardware is released, Windows gets more attention yet)

Yes there will be some pains as drivers are written for a Server nobody uses, but companies follow the money. When people who would buy their products complain that they don't have drivers in sufficient numbers it is eventually worth it to write those drivers. Then management looks at the budget and notices that they are written two different X drivers, and after a market survey drop the Xfree86 drivers that nobody is using anyway. (at least in a perfect world where management does their job)

Re:It won't hurt them.

[ImpTech]

But why, if Linux vendors switch to something else, will graphics chip makers continue to write for XFree86? It doesn't make sense. They didn't write the drivers in the first place because they *like* XFree86, they wrote them to appeal to the Linux market. If the Linux market moves, they will move. (unless, I suppose, they have a change of heart and decide Linux users aren't worth the effort... but that would have more to do with whether they think they're getting sales or not, not with whether or not they have to rewrite drivers)

Slashdoted. Here is a mirror:

[after]

Here are the files that were directly linked (sans the Slashdot article.)

already was incompatible

[puppy0341]

grep through the sources and you'll see it was incompatible before.
I don't see the problem with the new "Give us credit where you give others credit" license.

Re:already was incompatible

[Nasarius]

Because it makes it a real pain in the ass for distributors to ensure they're complying with each license... http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html

Re:already was incompatible

[puppy0341]

Please read the license, you will notice it does NOT require "All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software [...]".

Re:already was incompatible

[Anonymous Coward]

The GLX code in XFree86 has always incompatible with the GPL. It uses SGI's "Free Software Licence B", which the FSF points out on their list of licenses page isn't even Free Software, let alone GPL-compatible. Given how the GPL works, anything that links the GLX code, including some apps, and the X server itself, is by extension GPL-incompatible. So GPL-compatibility can't be the reason for the license fuss, because distros have been shipping XFree86 with the GPL-incompatible GLX code for years. As someone else said, the distros were moving away from XFree86 anyway and this is just a convenient "excuse" for it. freedesktop.org's xserver seems to have the same GPL-incompatible SGI GLX code, BTW, so that makes the freedesktop xserver GPL-incompatible too...

XFree86 and licensing

[Sandmann]

I think it is worth pointing out that back in 1998 The Open Group (now known as X.org) changed the licensing of X R6.4 to be proprietary, and only backed down when XFree86 and David Dawes explained exactly what they could with their proprietary server.

XFree86 is the reason we have a free software X server today. It is quite ironic that slashdot is now hating XFree86 because of licensing.

Re:XFree86 and licensing

[leandrod]

> back in 1998 The Open Group (now known as X.org) changed the licensing of X R6.4 to be proprietary, and only backed down when XFree86 and David Dawes explained exactly what they could with their proprietary server.

Not quite. I had a sideline participation at the time, emailing the X folks and putting them in contact with RMS.

In fact RMS and X were working out an agreement to GNU GPL the whole shebang, thus keeping it free while preserving The Open Group's interests, but XFree was adamant against it.

That move at the time would have preserved X.org, which today is basically a non-entity.

features?

[adamruck]

I for one couldn't give a crap about the license, I just want a gui that works nice. What features are in the new X? The site isn't responding to me, otherwise id look myself.

Re:features?

[MooKore 2004]

There are no compelling new features, apart from some routine driver updates, which can be backported. The ONLY reason why they upgraded is so they can have this dracronian licence! You need to give a crap, what if they updated it again, sayihg that they reserve the right to come around to your house and confiscate your computer if you don't agree.

Re:features?

[Ice_Balrog]

IIRC, mostly new drivers and updates to old ones.

Not much in the way of new features are in XFree86, if you really want new and shiney, get freedesktop.org's Xserver.

Re:features?

[plcurechax]

I just want a gui that works nice. What features are in the new X?

X is a low-level windowing system, not a desktop environment like CDE, KDE, GNOME, (or twm :).

It's new features are support for newer video cards, bug fixes and work arounds for broken video cards (and Dell laptop BIOSes with regards to VESA modes and 845 chipsets), IPv6 support, new version of Mesa (OpenGL 3D support), and FreeType (font library).

Re:features?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would freedesktop.org's Xserver work with Nvidia's accelerated driver?

Yes, I know that the driver isn't GPLed, but I need it if I want any 3D acceleration (and it's Nvidia's software, so I say that they get to distribute it as they wish so long as they don't violate any other licenses, which as far as I can tell they don't). If the driver is compatable with Xserver, I'll consider it. Otherwise, I'll stick with XFree86 4.3

Re:features?

[cheesybagel]

And a bad low-level windowing system at that. The 2D drawing API is something out of the stone age. The color system for one, is horribly complicated. Only supporting 24-bit displays helps cut the insanity somehow, since this way you sidestep the braindamaged palette allocation routines.

I should know, since I actually had to program on it. It also has no native support for alpha blending, anti-aliasing, double buffering, splines or beziers, anything that was leading edge back in the 1980s. Don't talk to me about extensions. This sort of thing should be standard be now. If the platform does not natively support it the API should provide software emulation. I don't want to make several application backends, reinvent the wheel so my program will work on all Linux desktops for something basic like double buffering.

Some concepts are nice. Like network graphics capability. That is a good thing. But I still think the best idea would be just to make a new windowing system and build X11 compatibility on top of that. Like Apple did with MacOS X.

Which major Distros are using 4.4?

[Hopelessness]

I haven't benn following this completely, but which if any of the major distros are going to go ahead and use 4.4?

Re:Which major Distros are using 4.4?

[ebbomega]

Um. Smoke much crack?

Unless you know of any major distros that have been released in the last week without freezing their packages, I'd imagine the answer to your question would be NONE.

Re:Which major Distros are using 4.4?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the single line text of the comment you are replying to, not just the headline.

which if any of the major distros are going to go ahead and use 4.4?

The key part is "going to go ahead". You should put down your crack pipe before you post smart ass replies.

Re:Which major Distros are using 4.4?

[grolschie]

Where can I get some of this crack? It sounds great! Afterall, if SCO use it.....

Re:Lets make it as complex as possible for everyon

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this modded as Flamebait?

You moronic moderators are gonna get yours. I meta-moderated every damn chance I get and trust me, you guys are getting slammed.

So we stick with 4.3. Big deal.

[nurb432]

Instead of freaking out, we as a community just drop 4.4 out the window, and stick with 4.3 until a viable alternative X server comes out.

As long as someone still develops drivers for 4.3, its not the end of the world. ( yes, its a major speed bump and makes the OSS world look stupid for the bickering.. but its not a show stopper )

And remember its just the XF86Free implementation that is hosed up now, not the X11 protocol..

Re:So we stick with 4.3. Big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as someone still develops drivers for 4.3, its not the end of the world. ( yes, its a major speed bump and makes the OSS world look stupid for the bickering.. but its not a show stopper )

What's new in 4.4 anyway besides driver updates?

Re:So we stick with 4.3. Big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as someone still develops drivers for 4.3, its not the end of the world.

Yeah like all those drivers for the ATI 9600/9800 cards. Those cards have only been out what, a year?

I have an original Radeon, and it STILL doesn't have video capture or tv-out support that works.

Re:So we stick with 4.3. Big deal.

[z4ce]

Actually, its not as bad as even sticking with 4.3. I suspect people will fork from 4.4-RC3 (or maybe it sRC2).

Ian

Re:So we stick with 4.3. Big deal.

[geminidomino]

As a "community of one", I say "screw that." If 4.4 works better, I'll use it. If it somehow becomes impossible to compile because of this licensing crap, I won't. If one of the forks works better than 4.4, I'll switch. As long as my boxen work and do what I need them to do, that's all that matters.

Like the saying goes: "Screw the philosophy. I'm just here for the cake."

This has no effect on Granny

[spitzak]

Say everybody *has* to use XFree4.4 and the license clause is as obnoxious as possible (ie far worse than it apparently actually is). What would happen is that every single program will print on startup "Portions of this are based on work by the XFree86 Consortium" or something like that. This has zero effect on end users or Grammy. Plenty of Windows programs print pages and pages of such copyright stuff in their About box and end users really don't care.

The problem is for developers, who don't want to be requried to print this message (but will do so if there was no alternative) and some legal problems with combining this with some code (of which there are alternatives that could be used if necessary).

The best equivalent would be to ask how users of MS Word are affected by a contract dispute between Microsoft and one of their programmers. If they fired him then the resulting program might be different, but to the end user it is meaningless.

Re:This has no effect on Granny

[Brandybuck]

What would happen is that every single program will print on startup "Portions of this are based on work by the XFree86 Consortium" or something like that.

Except that the new XFree86 license has NO clause requiring this. I suggest you re-read the license.

Re:This has no effect on Granny

[Piquan]

From what I can tell, it means that Granny can't get Gnome out of the box.

Gnome apps use GTK. GTK is distributed under the GPL, and uses libXext. Xext has an advertising clause. GTK (being GPLd) says it can't be distributed as part of an app with such a clause. (It doesn't list an advertising clause specifically, it just forbids additional restrictions.) So the Linux distro can't ship any Gnome apps, because it doesn't have a license to do so.

Re:This has no effect on Granny

[spitzak]

I understand that. What I meant was that even the *worst* interpretation of the license would have no "effect on granny".

When Announcing A New Version Of Something

[vigilology]

Perhaps it's best to list the main changes or include a link to the changelog.

Re:When Announcing A New Version Of Something

[rzei]

Or even better, wait until there's at least one mirror accepting connections.. *sigh* no mirror seems to have been updated.. Here are the release notes.

torrent anyone?

Re:When Announcing A New Version Of Something

[Anonymous Coward]

No torrents. Not being able to get this licene encumbred piece of shit is a good thing!

willing to TALK? wtf is this, the middle east?

[Anonymous Coward]

i wouldn't be suprised if linux never makes it to the desktop like this.

another nice article...

[gerbouille]

there's a nice article on OSnews which looks back on the whole XFree86 affair of past year ...

what about microwindows/nanogui

[Anonymous Coward]

microwindows/nanogui can be setup to be binary compatible with xlib.

FAQ, what FAQ?

[builderbob_nz]

I don't know about being dropped from distributions, but their FAQ has been dropped from the web :)

Eagerly awaiting death of XFree86

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe now linux can get a modern desktop architecture. Hopefully XFree86 won't fork... It's time to start from scratch and look towards the future.

About the ad clause

[PotatoHead]

These guys are wanting some attention, so they whine a little and get nothing. Then they force the issue and get the wrong sort.

Seems to me, credit is given where credit is due. If they actually were doing something worth really knowing about, wouldn't they actually get it? We have been seeing little spats happen for long enough now to raise a few eyebrows. Personally, I suspect some deeper problems behind this.

We need an active X development group that does everything it can to enable *nix systems to continue to develop. We don't need these petty squabbles.

Those of us who know what X brings to the table are happy using X. Replacing it really should not be an option at this point; however, I see plenty of folks not happy with X as it is today.

This is exactly why they are not getting the attention they crave. The job is not being done well enough plain and simple.

Fork or no, this is going to continue to be a problem until a group forms that can step up to the plate and hit a few home runs. Will it be the XFree guys or somebody else?

Whoever gets X development moving as it needs to will get all the attention they need. Stupid license clauses won't cut it.

Re:About the ad clause

[mungtor]

This is exactly why they are not getting the attention they crave. The job is not being done well enough plain and simple.

Generally, I find the inverse is true. The when a job gets done well enough, the people who do that job are taken for granted and very rarely given recognition for the work that they do. (Invisible or in Trouble)

XFree may not be the "best", but it is ubiquitous because it works. That's a lot more than can be said for many GPL'd projects.

Re:It's sad ... No, you're sad!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're seriously one HUGE idiot! Go back to windows...

That has to be one of the most idiotic comments I've ever heard on /. Shows your ignorance to what "open source" or "free software" is all about if all you know is GPL and LGPL.

As I said, go back to windows and do everyone a favor or nex time just shut your trap.

Dump it in place of what?

[ronmon]

Yeah, we all know about freedesktop.org, Ywindows, etc. But name an alternative that works now. I'm pretty fond of my GNOME DE and I won't be bailing out on X until something else actually works.

Fortunately for me, my Radeon 8500 runs just fine with xfree-4.3.0 and I have no plans to go shopping for the latest "AlphaGammatron v2.990zeta" video card. Hopefully a suitable replacement will come along, but it isn't here yet.

Re:Dump it in place of what?

[iabervon]

In favor of a more openly-developed fork of XFree86 4.4rc2, perhaps. The beauty of OSS is that, if the official core team goes so nuts that people can't stand it any more, they can dump the name and the old core team, and continue from the last good point.

I'd suggest that the distributions who aren't going to include versions under the new license start a new project into which they can put their contributions and the contributions of anyone who doesn't want to use the new license. I think they should bump the number of the project, and release XFree87 4.4 shortly.

Re:Dump it in place of what?

[110010001000]

"they can"? Who can? Who is willing to take over someones code base and continue on?

Sure, go ahead and start on it. You can even call it XFree2004.

In this case, the GPL is silly. There is no reason you can't have a license where someone is required to PUT A SINGLE LINE OF ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF THOUSANDS OF MAN HOURS OF FREE WORK. The argument is that if every project had that as a requirement than the acknowledgements could come to MANY MANY LINES. Wow, thats really horrible.

Re:Dump it in place of what?

[farnz]

Some of the complainers are just whining, greedy fools, yes. But some of them did a significant fraction of that "1000s of man-hours of work", notably the Debian guys, who did (and do) much of the work needed to get XFree86 working on non-x86 architectures, work which benefits things like porting XFree86 to AMD64 (Debian developers discovered and fixed many 32 bit/64 bit issues on other 64 bit platforms). Those people have the right to complain, and if they chose to use and maintain a fork, more power to them.

Re:Dump it in place of what?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be easier for them and more productive if they put away their religion for a moment and just added a few simple acknowledgements to a text file.

I don't understand why the GPL itself doesn't alreayd have the advertising requirement.

Saving disk space? What?

It's stupid.

I support the Debian guys added their names to a file or not. But it's the height of arrogance to tell someone else they must give up their own 1000s of hours of work without acknowledgement just because the debian guys are willing to martyr themselves like that.

GPL fanaticism is idiotic and suicidal. It's about the code, stupid.

For reals tho

[JohnwheeleR]

Open source and GPL in general are an easy model to adopt when banding together to protest the unethical practices of Microsoft, but why give software away for free ALWAYS and FOREVER? Maybe you are a follower? Maybe you want to grow a long beard and be dirty? Does it REALLY make sense?

So Theo joined the FSF huh?

[ThrobbingGristle]

It's not just FSF that has problems with this...

OpenBSD project isn't including code with the new license either:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=1 07 696705911864&w=2

You, my good man, are a troll.

Karma whore, here

[soloport]

For the 4.4 release, only:
* Anti-aliased font installation is supported through a graphical user interface
* nVidia and ATI video drivers have been poured in, native
* All Microsoft code found in the wild has been incorporated (must accept MS EULA during each boot process)

Did I leave anything out?

Re:Karma whore, here

[aled]

The new troubleshotting tool that configures and repairs automatically all problems when graphic mode don't start. And it has a beatiful and very intuitive GUI. Oh wait...

Just Wondering If This Is What Dawes et al. Want?

[judmarc]

I noticed when Googling around about Dawes that (besides the fact that apparently he lives rather close to me) he is running a business based on X, offering stuff like automagic configuration (at least some of which has made it into the X CVS). Could dropping the latest X from the major Linux distros leave Dawes as the only game in town for enterprises seeking the most enterprise-ready solution? And he wouldn't have to take responsibility for pulling it from his competition....

X servers on Freedesktop

[Alan Cox]

There are two X servers on freedesktop.org. One is Keiths experimental server the other is the X.org tree which is XFree 4.4 without the license change bits and with other stuff, and most of the people Dave Dawes fired working on it.

The x.org server is very much ready for prime time

Embroidering!

[Imperator]

That's what Linux needs! Proper support for embroidering! I hope the fd.o people get around to this soon. Linux really has opportunities in the market for embroidered devices...

Re:Embroidering!

[prockcore]

That's what Linux needs! Proper support for embroidering!

It would also meet the license requirement. Every "pixel" would be a little X. The refresh rate sucks though.

4.4rc2 is still old license

[Via_Patrino]

4.4rc2 is still old license

The average user should never see those things

[rsilvergun]

ordinarily this kind of stuff gets done by the driver manufacturer's software or the OS vender. If you had to edit the Windows equivalent of XF86Config it'd be just as much a pain in the ass (probably more, it'd be registry hacks). XFree86 is still used mainly in places where the user is expected to find editing a config file no big deal. Check Mandrake Linux, SuSe or Lindows if you want to see nice, end-user friendly frontends. The solution isn't to dumb things down, but to write intelligent tools that make things simple.

For users too

[Alan Cox]

As with as Keith's work there is the x.org reference server tree on freedesktop.org, which is basically 4.4 without the contaminated bits. I suspect the fact this tree was close to ready for full release has something to do with the sudden appearance of XFree 4.4, but maybe I'm just cynical.

"Careful with that X eugene"

Simply Put...

[EXTomar]

As mentioned in numberous other places, the reason why an "contributor/advertisement clause" is incompatible with the GPL because it sets a restriction on the software. No matter how innocent or benign one thinks it is putting restrictions like this on software blows. It isn't practical or very ethtical. It isn't good to be free except in the case where you forgot to have our names plaster in the right spots.

I am all for giving credit where credit is due. However that place and time is not at the license level.

Re:Simply Put...

[Anonymous Coward]

> No matter how innocent or benign one thinks it is putting restrictions like this on software blows

Nice try, but the GPL itself has very similar restrictions about maintaining copyright files and other notices.

The restriction itself is hardly 'non-Free' -- the only issue is that there's a slight incompatibility in the GPL's Credits requirements and XFree's.

"86'd" defined.

[Ars-Fartsica]

86ed

Remember XFree...

[sla291]

XFree is dying, maybe.

Most say that it sucks. I say it's not perfect but check this website : http://www.lynucs.org/

and you'll see that X can really make your desktop very eye-candy. (well, perhaps you already knew ;)

Don't blame XFree too much.. we're pretty all using it, even it may be the time to move on.

Re:Remember XFree...

[Reteo Varala]

You might notice that where transparency is used, transparent windows do not overlap other windows.

The reason for this is that it would kill the effect pretty badly...

What's the license change?

[Lothsahn]

I've been reading through the slashdot stories/posts, and I cannot seem to find anywhere what the problem with the new license is. The fact that xfree86.org is down doesn't help either.

Could someome tell me:
a) What is the license change?
b) Why it is so harmful?

Re:What's the license change?

[Arker]

They added an advertising clause.

Re:What's the license change?

[Anonymous Coward]

The sibling poster said simply that they added an advertising clause. This may not explain why everyone is in such a furor about it, so I'll explain.

The advertising clause simply requires that people who use the software give credit to the XFree86 organization where other credit is given. If you don't give credit to anyone, then just including the license (which I believe is required anyway) is enough.

Now, why is this such a big deal? Lots of people on Slashdot are wondering this. Why not give credit where it is obviously due? The truth is, nobody is upset about giving credit where credit is due. People are upset about GPL-compatibility.

See, BSD 3-clause licenses and the old X license were GPL compatible, which means that they can be relicensed under the GPL. That means that if I write a program and put it under the GPL, and I also want to use X libraries, I don't have any problems. As you probably know, much of what makes X11 usable on the desktop is GPL'd.

So basically, the problem isn't actually the advertising clause, the problem is that, if, for example, libXext is licensed in a way that is GPL-incompatible, then every GPL program that uses it suddenly can't use it anymore (this is all of GNOME, for example.)

So the problem is much more than just the advertising clause. It's about making X legally incompatible with most of the X apps used on linux today.

And from the BSD side of things, even OpenBSD (who hates the GPL with a passion) is critical of the new license, because it's wording isn't similar enough to legacy BSD licenses.

I couldn't care less

[Anonymous Coward]

Just compiled it from CVS with my awesome host.def. Fuck all licensing issues.

Re:From the FAQ (re GPL + APL-2.0)

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

I'm not sure, but I think the Apache 2.0 license has been revised further to make it more clear that it is GNU GPL compatible

Unfortunately not. Instead of fixing the problem, the Apache group made a public statement to say that the incompatibility doesn't exist. - The problem arose from the press release of the Apache License-2.0, in which they gave "GPL compatibility" as a justification for the new license. Note that if you combine a GPL'd and an APL'd work, it's the GPL'd works license that is infringed, so the decision isn't up to the Apache group. The Apache guys might need a good clothes line.

From FSF's license list: The Apache Software License, version 2.0: This is a free software license but it is incompatible with the GPL. The Apache Software License is incompatible with the GPL because it has a specific requirement that is not in the GPL: it has certain patent termination cases that the GPL does not require. (We don't think those patent termination cases are inherently a bad idea, but nonetheless they are incompatible with the GNU GPL.)

happened several times to my company

[Ender Ryan]

The tiny company I work for has had this happen several times over the past several years(3 times in under 7 years IIRC).

One program is a mass-emailing program which we use to send newsletters to our subscribers(yes, real paying subscribers, not spam :), which we bought because it had support for the databases we use. The other was a mass-faxing software/service, and the last was a subscription... thingymabob(never came in contact with that one myself, and it was 6 years ago).

All three of the above mentioned products were discontinued and caused us much trouble, one even being a program which expired after a certain period.

I am a big free software advocate, but I don't have to do any advocacy at my work, other than pointing out software that meets our needs. I have mostly been able to let the advantages of free software speak for itself.

Re:Just Wondering If This Is What Dawes et al. Wan

[Anonymous Coward]

You stupid jerk, you have absolutely no fucking idea on the issue. What you say is completely wrong.

I doubt anyone takes them seriously :-)

[melted]

Their main feature is "Translucent windows" fer chrissakes. Typical adolescent linux fanboys, move along, nothing to see there.

Re:I doubt anyone takes them seriously :-)

[pyite]

*Sigh* The technology that allows you to do translucent windows also allows you to do other nifty things. Why don't you read the how it works link before posting like you know what you're talking about.

but, but, but, STFU

[Ender Ryan]

Jesus Christ on a fucking broken Crutch, STFU already. "But what if they stop developing," "what if it forks," "which fork do I follow," "but what if this," "what if that," WHAT IF I DRIVE A METAL SPIKE THROUGH YOUR FUCKING BRAINS?!?!

*Cough* Ahem... What I mean is, this has happened before and it will happen again and is nothing to be too concerned about. There can be brief periods of pain, but it's generally not too bad.

Cheers.

Follow the money....

[crmurphey]

The furor over the license is generated by commercial interests and little else. Look at where the criticism of the license comes from. Is it a vendor that has sold repackaged XFree86 as a product for years and stands to benefit from calling it their own product?

Once you filter out FUD from vendors, what issues are left?

Even RMS claimed that the new "license requirement qualifies as free software".

RMS also claims that the new licensing policy will "eliminate the (GPL) incompatibility with applications".

It seems pretty clear once you filter out the noise....

Re:Follow the money....

[Anonymous Coward]

RMS also claims that the new licensing policy will "eliminate the (GPL) incompatibility with applications".

No, the page you pointed to does not say that. Read the fucking
page again.

Re:Follow the money....

[Anonymous Coward]

Once you filter out FUD from vendors, what issues are left?

[cut: one link to xfree86.org]

[cut: one link to xfree86.org]

Interesting how you claim that those Linux "vendors" (is Debian really a vendor?) are spreading FUD with no particular argument to support that claim, then link to nothing but pages at xfree86's site.

Gee, yeah, after you eliminate one side of an argument for no reason, the other side's point of view does seem to clearly win out...

Re:Follow the money....

[runswithd6s]

This post needs to be modded up and it's parent modded down for being misinformative.

Re:Follow the money....

[dvdeug]

The furor over the license is generated by commercial interests and little else.

I've heard Theo deRaad and Branden Robinson come out against this license, and neither of them are connected to commercial interests. The furor comes from someone creating yet another license with the obnoxious, unliked, BSD advertising clause (which NetBSD and OpenBSD has worked to remove from their systems, and Berkeley removed from all the original BSD code) and applying it to an ancient codebase that has always been licensed under the most liberal of terms.

The fork has already happened.

[mst76]

It appears to be pretty recent, and not yet advertised, but freedesktop.org has forked Xfree86 from 4.4 RC2. Note: this independent from their own experimental X server to which everybody is referring (but which is not really ready for consumption yet). If XFree86 doesn't revert to the old license, distributors are likely going to package the freedesktop fork. It remains to be seen if the major XFree86 developers will follow.

*Copyright law* prevents that, not the EULA.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re-introducing the Microsoft changes to the BSD code-bases would be distribution, and the BSD doesn't require derivative apps to allow free redistribution. Hence the whole difference between BSD and GPL licenses.

The EULA has nothing to do with it.

Re:*Copyright law* prevents that, not the EULA.

[rking]

Re-introducing the Microsoft changes to the BSD code-bases would be distribution, and the BSD doesn't require derivative apps to allow free redistribution. Hence the whole difference between BSD and GPL licenses.

The EULA has nothing to do with it.

Likewise with the GPL. It's copyright law that prohibits redistributing code without permission. The GPL, like the Microsoft EULA, does not give you permission to redistribute the code under a BSD license. Consequently, unless you have some other permission, copyright law prohibits you from doing so.

"Virality" is equally meaningful or meaningless in both cases.

RMS doesn't like it?

[EvilAlien]

Someone should tell the XFree86 people, because they seem to think otherwise. The bit on the XFree86 Project License Modification says:

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. This licence, like our previous, is fully free, (how do we know this? no less than the world authority on free software, RMS, has said so) and it's the hope of the XFree86 Project to no longer allow non-free licences into our tree so we can become a fully free-software compliant X product.

Whatever the issue is, Open Source is going to suffer for this squabble. The GPL acting as a roadblock to integration of new technology for the desktop is just going to prove Microsoft's point that the license is eeeeevvuuuuull. I think this may do more real damage to "The Cause" then the fiaSCO.

Re:RMS doesn't like it?

[Alan Cox]

Actually I think the unfortunate thing is that people have spent a year being pseudo-nice to each other instead of just forking the tree when Keith got kicked out. Thats probably done more harm than good.

The problem with the license is one of changes. You can't go around springing new licensing suprises on people without expecting them to be upset - whatever the license (as MS themselves have found ...)

Now its over everyone can back to work sanely and Dave Dawes can go and do his own thing in Dawes-space, or throw in the towel and contribute to the X.org tree. I still hope the latter because I don't think Dave Dawes did anything maliciously or without belieiving he was doing the right thing for X, he just seems to have been wrong.

Alan

Alan

Re:RMS doesn't like it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey AC, you shouldn't be posting on slashdot, you should be home working on your friggin Masters degree while on hiatus :P

Really?

[mindstrm]

Whether the GPL says you have to keep copyright notices or not, stripping copyright notices without permission is already illegal under copyright law. So is fraud.

Claiming someone elses work as your own can constitute fraud. Stripping copyright notices can get you in trouble with the authors as well.

Note that I'm talking about the source here, not the output of the program itself. If the output used to have a banner that said who made it.. that does not need to be kept.

Remember, the GPL only licenses you to do some stuff.. it does not remove copyright law.

In fact, being forced to keep a list of contributors in the source of copywritten code should be just FINE, and in fact, encouraged, by everyone...

Re:Really?

[JDizzy]

Yes really! But in the context of binary distribution, not source code. In other words, lots of people contribute to the Free Xfee86 project, and under the terms of the new license. If you decided to distribute a livecd that ran whatever OS, it would seem that these license terms stipulate that a list of the contributors follow that binary distributions. Such as a fiel which holds the names of contributors.

That is why this entire thing is so absurd, that it is silly. Basicly what is happening is by design of the FSF. We have reached a place where the GPL has a monoploy on OSS, which is in turn being used against the community at large. Well I suspect the XFree86n foundation simply is feed up with it, and this is their way to point out these facts.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright law does not apply to anything in the public domain. It is perfectly legal to take public domain work, do anything you want to it, claim it as your own and recopyright it as your own. You can strip anything off of it that you want.

I don't see any difference between public domain and the bsd without the advertising clause.

Re:Really?

[mindstrm]

Yeah.. brilliant observation you have there.
But we aren't talking about public domain works.. we are talking about copywritten works under various licenses.

You cannot claim copyright on something you did not create.

You cannot take Alice in Wonderland and claim you hold the copyright.

Re:And XFree86 Inc. has shown to be willing to tal

[macshit]

It is not clear why XFree86 has to modify their license to suit a Linux distribution, which is suppose to be a compilation of Free/Open Source Linux software, not a dictator of Open Source.

Of course they don't `have to' do anything. But whether they (or you) like it or not, Debian and other distros have a fair amount of influence, and if they all move to some other system, the XFree86 project could end up being marginalized, and I doubt they want that.

If these arm chair lawyers are so concerned about GPL, why don't they write a new X Window System from scratch, and release it for free/Free under the GPL.

Because they don't have to -- they can just take XFree86 4.3.xxx and fork it. Easy!

[and thus the beauty of free software is illustrated.]

Confused with the window manager again

[dbIII]

If Linux is going to even have a chance at breaking through to the desktop world, it has to stop looking like crap. With a little customization

X is not the top level, the window manager and the applications give you the user interface, and if your window manager looks like crap then use another one.

Enlightenment (www.enlightenment.org) has been around for quite a few years now, and can look like a lot of different things - but if you give it 64 virtual desktops with a different background image on each and turn on all special effects it will run very slowly. If you use a sane configuration it will run OK on a pentium 90 with 32MB.

There are also many others which have been developed since then - there is more software available than what comes with your distribution.

One final thing - gnome is not X, it is a whole suite of different programs, which is why it takes so long to start up. The whole idea of there being one program that does everything is just an artifact of the Microsoft court case - your web browser is NOT part of your operating system, and the gnome panel is NOT part of X, they are seperate programs.

Re:Confused with the window manager again

[Nuclear Elephant]

You are absolutely correct, but the fundamental support for certain functions needs to be there in order to code these things into higher-level applications. Presently it is not - when FDO did its shadowing completely software-rendered (no hardware acceleration) it was too slow to use.

Re:Confused with the window manager again

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but as far as the masses are concerned, they are a part of the operating system because it's all a part of what they're operating. The semantics between what is the OS and what is the window manager and what is kernel and what is the browser is entirely irrelevant. When the Linux geek few understand that then maybe, just maybe, there is a chance at the desktop.

For most people if the headlights are out then there is something wrong with the car. It doesn't matter if the engine still works. A user will blame RedHat for their SEGFAULT just as quickly as you will blame Microsoft for your GPF.

Re:And XFree86 Inc. has shown to be willing to tal

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. I predict forking.

We actually saw this years ago when ssh.com made their SSH 1.2.x release no longer open source. The OpenSSH developers forked from there, and have created a far superior product.

I'm just afraid of effort wasted, for example producing device drivers that can't be ported to the other system. We get the same fussing with Gnome/KDE widgets now, and it's silly.

With my tinfoil hat on...

[jejones]

Isn't MS laughing over this whole affair?

Graphics card makers refuse to release info allowing Open Source drivers to take full advantage of their hardware; heck, people gush over the major proctalgia of NVidia's driver that you get to recompile every time there's a kernel upgrade.

Now XFree86 decides to change its license in a way that is incompatible with GPL, so that Linux distributions refuse to use XFree86 4.4. The free alternatives (freedesktop.org, Y, etc.) need rewritten drivers. Does anyone think the hardware vendors will write multiple drivers when it's hard enough to pry one out of them?

PCI Express is on its way, and the claim is that it will kill AGP. How long will one be able to survive with a free X, or XFree86 4.3? (Not a rhetorical question; I don't know enough about the hardware to say, and really would like an answer.)

Re:With my tinfoil hat on...

[Grievre]

Uh... you get to recompile DRM with every kernel upgrade, as well as ALSA, i2c etc and just about any other kernel module. nvidia's driver isn't unique in this.

The actual problem is...

[leonbrooks]

...that BSD and the new XFree86 licence require you to acknowledge the authorship and GPL forbids you from adding restrictions not in the GPL - including an advertising clause.

I would be happy to see the licence backed out and the major distributors voluntarily add a splash screen giving major credits and referring the viewer to a website with extended acknowledgements.

I would be just as happy to see a GPL "A" variant arise which was GPL plus advertising clause. This would allow you to GPLA-license BSD code which you are modifying, effectivly getting the GPL's sterner protection but without treading on the intentions and rights of the original authors.

Of course, if you're working from a no-advertising BSD licence, these problems evapourate. Personally, I'd like to see XFree86 with a splash screen since it'd give you something to read while KDE (or whatever) starts, and it'd overwrite the splash screen from NVidia (or other manufacturer) who are not at all shy about claiming credit for stuff.

Re:The actual problem is...

[bigblondguy]

yeah, you would probably love it until about the 50th time it came up... This is one of the reasons I dont use windows anymore. If you want to add that kind of thing to your computer, feel free, but keep it away from mine.

Re:The actual problem is...

[End11]

Option "NoLogo" "1" # fixes that stupid nvidia logo nicely, without the need to replace it with something equally annoying

Re:The actual problem is...

[Ed Avis]

Of course, this proposed GPL+obnoxious advertising clause wouldn't solve the particular problem of combining with vanilla GPL software.

Yeah sure.

[jotaeleemeese]

The GPL should be broken to allow for integration.

Lets brake matters of principle to allow for a bit of convenience. And to get a pat in the back from MS?

Yeah, way to act, honest to goodness, it is heart warming that there are people out there ready to compromise principles no matter what.

Let's talk about something other than the licence

[osho_gg]

OK. Enough talking about licence changes. How about talking about the new release and what new exciting things it provides? I browsed through the entire release notes and could not find a single thing that will get me excited about trying out the new release. Nothing like, xrandr in 4.3 release or sub-pixel anti-aliased fonts in 4.1/4.2. In fact, nothing other than bug fixes that would benefit X for desktop user. I guess Keith Packard's absense is being felt in this release notes. Am I missing something that you noticed?

One good thing about Theo...

[leonbrooks]

...is that you're never left wondering where you stand with him. (-:

On the contrary

[moltar77]

If you've every installed nVidia drivers for XWindows, you have to edit XF86Config. Ever tried upgrading the kernel in Fedora core 2? X won't work anymore after that, because you have to edit XF86Config to change the mouse to /dev/input/mice (or something like that). I don't know about you, but the REAL distributions aren't entirely caught up with making the whole config process transparent... albeit, they are getting better.

Mandrake does

[leonbrooks]

Simple enough for you?

Re:Mandrake does

[jejones]

Yes, indeed. Thanks!

Mandrake 10.0 does dual monitors...

[leonbrooks]

...and a few other non-standard configs like monitor-plus-TV.

My AOpen Optical OpenEye WheelMouse O35G...

[leonbrooks]

...(I kid you not, that's it's full name) has two scroll-wheels plus four other buttons. Coming soon, Ctrl, Shift and Alt buttons and the Dvorak Mouse.

No worries: /usr/Y1R04/ or /usr/FD1R04 any good?

[leonbrooks]

G/D/R

This appears to be the list since 4.3.0...

[leonbrooks]

...is there one for the delta between 4.4rc2 and 4.4.0? It's probably a much shorter list, and IIRC at least the VIA, SiS, nv drivers, FreeType2 and Mesa stuff can't fall under the new licence.

Re:This appears to be the list since 4.3.0...

[plcurechax]

..is there one for the delta between 4.4rc2 and 4.4.0?

Don't know off-hand.

IIRC at least the VIA, SiS, nv drivers, FreeType2 and Mesa stuff can't fall under the new licence

The drivers were not explicited excluded by the license change (like the xlib was). FreeType2 and Mesa have their own license(s) - FreeType2 is dual licensed. The driver licenses depend on who contributed the code. Numerous developers (namely most not on the XFree86 Board) have indicated they don't want the XFree86 1.1 license used on their code. The bulk of the code affected by the 1.1 license is the X Server code. Not the hardware drivers, and not the xlibs.

New tell the rest of the story

[leonbrooks]

Fedora, Mandrake, OpenBSD and others have also "no thanksed" the new licence.

XFree86 has been willing to talk, but not (quoth Theo deRaadt) to "use the same words" as every other advertising-clause BSD licence. Talk the talk, yes, but walking the walk hasn't happened much.

I would personally be happy to add a splash screen or whatever, but not to be required to so do.

Hi Alan, I think you've struck the basis for...

[leonbrooks]

...at least 99% of known squabbles. (-:

I find it much more productive to start from the premise that I'm wrong, even if it goes squarely against my nature.

But what if...

[leonbrooks]

...there were no more hypothetical questions?

Some clarifications

[jaaron]

Did you read the most recent ASF position on this? The matter is due to a misunderstanding how patents work under the ASL versus how they work under the GPL. The matter will probably not be completely resolved until there is a better understanding of software patents and/or a court case involving patents and these open source license.

One important point: GPL-compatibility was not the only "justification for the new license" by a long shot. That was one of many goals, but not the main point of the license.

So, there has been progress on this issue, but it's not as clear cut as you make it out.

The GPL license should change

[Anonymous Coward]

"It looks as if the XFree86 people have a short timespan to either rethink their license changes or be dropped from every/almost every Linux distribution in favor of a forked codebase." So you're going to fork X from an ealier version bvcause you don't want to be forced to put the author's names in the documentation? Sounds like GPL is a little inflexible, and maybe it should be changed. In general the GPL is a lot more restritive than the X license anyway.

Re:The GPL license should change

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't about not wanting too put the Aurthor's name(s) in the documentation, the problem is that the GPL doesn't allow you too be forced too do so (that isn't free). And you're right the GPL is a little inflexible when it comes too freedom, and changing the GPL would defeed the purpose of that licens. With that said, I do however believe that it is the authors right (and freedom) to choose which licens his/hers software is released under.
And I'm sad by this imcompatibility, and strongly hope that the problems will be resolved, and NO forking isn't the solution.

Re:Let's talk about something other than the licen

[FullCircle]

Keith and other motivated devs couldn't get anything into X in the first place, that is why they left.

And THAT is why there is nothing big in this release.

Re:Some clarifications (but you're wrong)

[Anonymous Coward]

> GPL-compatibility was not the only "justification for the new license"

Mod parent: "-1 argues-against-something-the-parent-post-didnt-say "

Parent post said that GPL compatibility was cited as *a* justification, not *the* justification. (and in your post you confirm that what the parent said is actually true - but you then go on to argue against some figment of your imagination.

Are you for real?

[bonch]

as Linux desktop adoption has surpassed Apple's

Ahahaha...you're referring to that debunked Slashdot article, aren't you?

Even if Linux DID surpass OS X, it's doing extremely poorly considering OS X kicks Linux's ass in the apps department.

Re:Let's talk about something other than the licen

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I missing something that you noticed?

Well, a lot of us have been waiting for that new VIA chipset driver. It's for an integrated video chip which is in a lot of those mini-PCs and also some desktops and laptops. Unfortunately, only a minimal version of the code for XFree86 4.3 exists (basic accelerated 2D, but lacking everything else -- see here).

In other words

[bonch]

In other words, we shouldn't fix what was broken in the first place because people happened to adapt to the flaw to begin with?

Sounds like Windows and its backwards-compatibility.

Re:In other words

[afidel]

No, it's not a bug it's a matter of style. So the question becomes why break things because someone disagrees with history, the official style guide (that's what the LSB is afterall), etc.

No

[0x0d0a]

Two reasons why the GPL shouldn't be changed:

* One: the GPL covers *far*, *far* more software than XFree86. The XFree86 codebase, large as it is perhaps a hundredth of a percent of the GPLed software out there.

* Two: This is not about the license so much as political crap about XFree86. Some people have wanted to fork for a while and are just looking for a reason.

Frankly, I think XFree86 is a lousy thing to fork, because it's the sort of software that's a bitch to maintain, but if KP is up to it, freedesktop.org may be worthwhile. He certainly has the backing of a lot of people, and RH's been making moves towards switching to freedesktop.org for a while.

Dear Ann,

[Wolfier]

You're fired.

Bill

Re:Dear Ann,

[Anonymous Coward]

Fired via a slashdot post! Goes well with my being fired via a message on my phone!

XFree86/freedesktop-kernel interaction?

[0x0d0a]

Alan,

I dunno how much you dabble with the related code, but how likely is a fork of X going to be to cause issues with the fact that X interfaces with kernel modules...say, freedesktop.org wants to go one way, and XFree86 wants to go another...which supporting code goes in the kernel, or is that a non-issue? I know that it's already caused fun for the Red Hat packagers, who never really expected to have to support multiple XFree86-libs-style packages...

NT 3.1 and NT 3.5

[Anonymous Coward]

Note the post above says "NT 3.51 and later".
BSD code was used, and is now gone.

BTW, Linux Net2 is not based on BSD Net2.
The KAQ9 stack is another independant one.

parent is unfairly moderated

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent post (by me, Anonymous Coward), is factual - it quotes it's parent post, refutes the validity of the claim, and refutes the legitimacy of the rest of the parent post on the grounds that it's grounds were shakey.

Linux needs Embroidering Support

[0x0d0a]

I realize that this *sounds* funny, however this is apparently a serious problem.

There is reverse engineering work to do first.

Re:Linux needs Embroidering Support

[Imperator]

Wow. As ridiculous a use for Linux as I can find, it turns out someone actually wants to do it. :) (And yes, I realize that controlling an embroidering machine isn't half as ridiculous as a potato-powered web server.)

The GPL is the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that the GPL tries really hard to be viral whenever you try to mix GPL and other code. When actually mixing source from differently licenced sources that makes sense - all licences need to be fulfilled on the same code. Its either possible or not.

But GPL goes a step further and tries to encumber code that's simply linked. Over the years the FSF have had to back down on some of the more outrageous results of this policy, a policy that resembles Microsofts 'embrace & extend' theft attempts. Its not that long since linking against libstdc++ encumbered C++ programs - simply using the C++ standard library infected your code!

The Apache licence does not need fixing. The GPL needs fixing to be more tolerant of other licences, its a licence who's purpose is the propagation of the GPL not the propagation of F/OSS. Being 'GPL compatible' is a test of whether your source can be assimilated, nothing more. Its a 'one size fits all' philosophy with no room for dissent.

Re:And XFree86 Inc. has shown to be willing to tal

[incabulos]

Obviously the smart thing to do here would be to fork the project from its most recent viable-licensed release, re-license it under the GPL ( something permitted by the BSD license, presumably the MIT-XConsortium license permits something similar ), and build from that as a starting point.

You might recall when the commercial SSH folks started to add OSS-incompatible clauses to their license, the project was forked and became OpenSSH under the strict provisions of the vanilla BSD license. Now, OpenSSH has buried the commercial SSH variant, and is shipped with many of the modern *nix variants.

There is no reason why the same cant happen with XFree86 - the project will be probably be stronger after the fork than it has ever been, going by historical precedent.

I don't reboot my computer that often...

[leonbrooks]

...and it's not like an application's splash screen, which comes up every time you launch the app. Saturation advertising. Ptui! Because you can't say it well, you have to say it constantly before anyone accepts it.

Not that I don't see where you're coming from. I'm currently diddling around with WINE, and I've run across one app (a game) whose splash-screen locks up hard under WINE but if you bypass it (turn the call into NOPs) it works without trauma, and another whose splash-screen works but the hotspot isn't over the drawn button and the mouse cursor doesn't change so it's very hit-and-miss to get the thing started.

Re:I don't reboot my computer that often...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is more than that. It is the ideal. I use linux because I can control just about anything I want, in any way. By putting limitations on my control, you undermine my reason for using linux. Yes, I believe they deserve recognition, but why not on websites rather than my OS???

Re:I don't reboot my computer that often...

[leonbrooks]

Yes, I believe they deserve recognition, but why not on websites rather than my OS???

Because you'll never see it, and never know. NIMBY syndrome. My beef is not with the recognition, but that it it mandated and in particular that this mandate makes it GPL-incompatible because it is an additional restriction not found in the GPL.

If you'd posted under a real name, you'd get a real reply.

HOW DID THIS GET MODDED UP?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

This post contains nothing save a link. What the fuck? This isn't interesting!

Re:And XFree86 Inc. has shown to be willing to tal

[zsau]

Why on earth from scratch? The XFree86 code was meant to be free. Why not just take the last free version and GPL that?

From a CTO Point of View

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why Linux will fail.

you guys sound like a bunch of whining cry babies.

FreeDesktop X or Y? Which one is better?

[Adolph_Hitler]

Which one is farther along and better in structure? Has anyone compared the code and featureset?

Serious question about XFree86

[FullCircle]

Can someone please explain how David Dawes can still be in charge of the project after this past year of turmoil?

He didn't start the project and it is an important community project for 90% of the users of just about any "alternative" OS.

Why hasn't someone else replaced him?

Why are they supporting SCO?!

[rice_burners_suck]

SCO OpenServer support updates. XFree86 4.4 now works on Release 5.0.7 with Maintenance Pack 1, or on prior releases through Release 5.0.4. Please consult the README.SCO file for details.

Why in the "F" word are people putting time and effort into supporting SCO rubbish?!?! The entire world should do everything it can to make its products INCOMPATIBLE with their stuff. Let every IT department in the world know that they should dump whatever SCO stuff they have in favor of other products, or they'll end up with outdated and incompatible stuff!

Re:Why are they supporting SCO?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why in the "F" word are people putting time and effort into supporting SCO rubbish?!?! The entire world should do everything it can to make its products INCOMPATIBLE with their stuff.

No. One of the nice things I like about the Linux world is the software respects me the user, instead of trying to control me. I avoid software that doesn't respect me. Now SCO incompatibilies won't effect me, but I will boycott such software on principle.

Now, if someone decides they don't want to put in the time and effort to make their code compatible with SCO software, that is an entirely different matter. That I have no problem with. But neither will I criticize hackers for maintaining compatibility.

From what I've heard, SCO stuff is already outdated, and given the recent direction of the company, they don't need help in driving their customers away.

curses everywhere

[Ragica]

I think this is ncurses big chance for a come back. Everyone looking for XFree86 alternative, look no further!

Interesting: GNU/K{Free,Net}BSD support.

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I saw this in the release notes.

Pseudo-intelligent comment:
Interesting. My impression of the GNU/*BSDs were that they were an exercise to prove GNU software was more important than Linux. As such GPL licensing issues are critical. I'm surprised they'll accept 4.4 because of licensing issues.

Flammable comment:
I'm sure all 6 of the general users that run KFreeBSD will be very happy.

Ok, liscense out of the way...

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the new version. They added support for my radeon card that I have been frustrated with for the last month. If you have driver troubles with laptop radeon cards I suggest you give it a try.

From the FAQ-2D GPU

[Anonymous Coward]

"OpenGL will be used for drawing, so you can have very rich, yet fast, vector-graphics based applications.
"

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the vectors in a GPU, oriented more toward meshes (closed forms), than say open forms, and the manipulation of those forms (e.g. Flags waving which is a textured rectangular mesh undulating).

Also in a vector based WM there's still the issue of display lists and context switching.

GPU's are gaming orientated, and that makes them less than ideal for a 2D UI.

Re:From the FAQ-2D GPU

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't really matter as they are about 50 times faster than needed anyway. Can you name one recent GPU that can't fill dull fullscreen polygons at the screen refresh rate?

Re:From the FAQ-2D GPU

[be-fan]

Not necessarily. You see, the graphics card has two major components: geometry and rasterization. The geometry portion handles manipulation of all those meshes, while the rasterizer draws the 2D triangles generated by the geometry portion after mapping from 3D space to 2D (screen) space. Now, when you do a 2D engine in OpenGL, you usually set up the geometry portion, say using an orthogonal projection, so most of that manipulation is bypassed. So the net result is that the rasterizer does what it is good at --- drawing textured 2D triangles, and the geometry engine handles relatively simple tasks like transforms (rotation, scaling, etc).

Re:From the FAQ-2D GPU

[be-fan]

Oh, one more thing. Yes, there is the issue of context switching if each app has its own OpenGL context. However, that won't necessarily be the case. Applications will not be using OpenGL, but Cairo. One way to use Cairo is to have the Cairo client-side library send drawing commands to the X server, and have the X server render them (via OpenGL). That way, you only need a single OpenGL context --- for the X server.

What licensing changes?

[pele]

The fact that you have to supply the 3 paragraphs somewhere on your distribution CD is a problem now?

Am I the only one to think that slashdot is turning into a bit of a joke lately?

Re:What licensing changes?

[dvdeug]

The fact that you have to supply the 3 paragraphs somewhere on your distribution CD is a problem now?

If they just had to supply the 3 paragraphs, why all the verbage? All they would have to say then is just keep this license with the program. That's part of the problem with this license; it's clearly asking for a lot more than the writers are admitting, because otherwise they'd just use the old BSD clause, which would be much less of a problem.

Re:What licensing changes?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the fact that combining X with GPL software is now illegal.

Dear Bill,

[Ann Elk]

You should really keep up with your mail. I retired 4 years ago. So fuck off.

Kisses,
Ann

Community of one

[nurb432]

Unfortunately, most of us don't have that luxury.

We have business customers and licensing issues ARE relevant. As is support from the distribution vendor, etc. Voiding their 'approved list' doesn't get you assistance from them very quickly.

True at home on your own it wont matter a lot.. but the rest of us do have to worry about it.

If they built reliable drivers...

[leonbrooks]

...I'd only ever see it once anyway. As it is, I'll never buy another NVidia card again if I can help it. Reliable NVidia drivers are a highly ephemeral thing.

Re:From the FAQ (re GPL + APL-2.0)

[j7953]

Note that if you combine a GPL'd and an APL'd work, it's the GPL'd works license that is infringed, [...]

Well, that depends on what license you use for the combined work. The GPL requires you to use the GPL, so if you do that, there's nothing the publisher of the GPL'd work could complain about. What might be infringed however is the Apache License: iff the GPL does not fulfill all of the terms of the Apache License, then by publishing the combined work under the GPL, you have not fulfilled all of the Apache License's terms, which is obviously illegal.

Also see on of my earlier posts on the same issue.

Disclaimer: IANAL etc.

So does SuSE 9.0

[Grishnakh]

SuSE 9.0 had no problem autodetecting my dual monitors and setting up X for them.

Excellent! Fedora, anyone else...?

[leonbrooks]

The more the merrier.

Good point, and I don't see a quick solution.

[leonbrooks]

We can always hope that some genius will find a way to work that into GPLv3, but the legal gymnastics to do that safely are beyond me.