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Mon, 12 Apr 2004

If you read FootNotes, then you came across this article discussing Dropline Gnome 2.6 (binary distribution of Gnome for Slackware).

What I noticed is the following excerpt:

With the license change to XFree86 4.4, Dropline GNOME has also joined the revolution and moved to X.Org's X11 server (don't worry, the nVidia and ATI binary drivers still work).

How is anyone so clueless allowed to even make a statement such as this? XFree86 4.4 has licence changed so it is not completely free software anymore (actually, the main bottleneck is that it's incompatible with GPL, or, you cannot combine GPL pieces with it because of a new term in a licence). Yet, this smart guy who wrote the comment thinks it's all right to use binary nVidia and ATI drivers, yet it's not all right to use (almost) free software coming from XFree86?

The "revolution" that is happening is caused by slow pace of development in XFree86 (actually, not of development, but of accepting grand new features). Licence change has caused vendors to move from XFree86, but that's a non-issue if we're talking about [technical] "revolution". All of the changes in FreeDesktop's (perhaps even "Keith Packard's") server, mistakenly called "X.Org" (probably because XFree86 provides access to CVS in a "xorg" module, which is therefore used on FreeDesktop's X server implementation derived from XFree86's one), are equally applicable to XFree86 repository; they simply aren't merged back yet. So, all revolution there is will equally apply to XFree86 as to any other server.

This is also where we see GPL at work: as soon as XFree got licence incompatible with GPL, we saw a fork. Yeah, there was talk of fork even earlier, but it failed to materialize until it became inevitable, in order to make it possible to distribute whole free operating system stack on a single CD, without having to adhere to obscure conditions such as putting a name of contributor which provided 100 lines of code on each disk.

[23:07] | [] | # | G | | TB

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