XOrg Foundation Opens Membership and Elections

XOrg Foundation writes "To active developers and users of the X Window System:You are invited to join and help shape the direction of the new X.Org Foundation. Membership in the X.Org Foundation is now open and free.Applications for membership are sought from all contributors to the X and Desktop communities." Read more below for the rest of the information from the foundation.

The Interim Board of directors has established that examples of acceptable
contributions that will qualify you for membership in the Foundation include
coding, bug-fixing, testing, design, documentation, translation,
administration or maintenance of project-wide resources, speaking at
conferences, and supporting bugzilla or release management.

Should you wish to apply for free membership in the X.Org Foundation, then
please visit:

http://www.x.org/XOrg_Foundation_Membership.html

All Members are eligible for election to the Board of Directors and the
Architecture Group of the XOrg Foundation. The XOrg Foundation is now
seeking nominations for candidates for election to these groups.

Nominations for each election are open until 23.59 PDT on Friday 30th April
2004 for those Members of the X.Org Foundation who wish to stand for
election. You may nominate yourself for election. You may not nominate any
other member.

There will be 8 people elected to each of the Board of Directors and the
Architecture Group. In this first year of the X.Org Foundation, the four
candidates polling the most votes in each election will be granted a two
year term of office (until June 2006), and the next four candidates will
receive 1 year term of office (until June 2005). In subsequent years, four
seats of each group will be re-elected in the annual elections.

It is permissible for a candidate to stand for election for both the Board
of Directors and the Architecture Group.

The responsibilities of an elected person are detailed in the current
Bylaws of the X.Org Foundation, which can be found at:

http://www.x.org/XOrg_ByLaws_17Sep03.pdf

In addition, an elected person will be required to attend the annual
meeting of the X.Org Foundation, which will be held a location determined
in advance by the Board of Directors.

Should you wish to enter your candidacy for these elections, then please
prepare a personal statement of up to 200 words that can be provided to
prospective voters. This statement, and the statement of contribution to
the X.Org Foundation (which you completed when applying for membership)
will be made available to all voters to help them make their voting
decisions.

Once you have completed your personal statement, then you may visit:

http://www.x.org/member/XOrg_Foundation_Election_N omination.tpl

to enter your candidacy for the X.Org Foundation elections.

We look forward to your membership and candidacy submissions,

The Interim Board
X.Org Foundation."

Comments

More infighting?

[Seth Finklestein]

Great. That's just what we need: more infighting among the open-source elite.

I don't mean to go on a rant here, but look what we're up against. Many times, clients who would otherwise enjoy the flexibility of Linux are appalled by the infighting and bickering that takes place among projects. Consider the dozens of distributions, forks, and delays caused by a licence not being "free enough." My clients want to have good-quality software. In the real world, good-quality software comes with no strings attached.

In short, please work on developing good software. As long as it's free as in $0.00, I'll be happy.

Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Impatient Consultant

Re:GPL?

[runderwo]

The big discussion was because the latest XFree license(v.1.1) holds a clause that makes it incompatible with GPL, which then might produce massive problems with anything linked to it.

It only produces "massive problems" in the FSF's interpretation of the GPL. I don't share their interpretation of dynamic linking as creating a derived work, and without that interpretation, there is no problem writing dynamically linked applications with the new license.

It's very similar to SCO's claim that writing your code against the UNIX ABI somehow causes it to be a derived work of SCO's code. At least the FSF doesn't try to claim ownership of such code, though.

There is no way around the fact that dynamic linking happens at runtime, on the user's system, and under the control of the user. There is no possible way that a distributor could be held responsible for what a user does with the software. The only thing that could be argued is intent on the behalf of the distributor, if he distributed the GPL binary with linker references to a proprietary library within the same archive or from the same web site. But even that is shaky.

IMO, the dynamic vs static linking distinction should be dropped from GPLv3. It is a source of much confusion and dubious gain, while seeming almost like a EULA clause cloaked in sheep's clothing in that it tries to control what happens on the end user's system. Make no claim whatsoever about dynamic linking, but disallow distribution of statically linked proprietary applications and reserve that for LGPL licensed apps.

Another thing GPLv3 could do is specifically enumerate categories of license clauses which are not part of GPLv3 itself, but are nevertheless considered not to be non-free. Thus when you link software under GPLv3 and another free license, you don't have the silly problems caused by GPLv2's "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein." The GPLv2 is preventing software which is under perfectly reasonable free software licenses (even according to the FSF!) from being aggregated with GPL works, simply because they have added a term to their license which is not non-free in the least, but nevertheless "imposes a further restriction" and causes its license to be incompatible with the GPL.