glib dependency for the X Server

Erwin Rol mailinglists at erwinrol.com
Mon Apr 3 03:22:20 PDT 2006


On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 11:41 +0300, Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 03, 2006 at 11:15:59AM +0200, Erwin Rol wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 18:46 +1000, Russell Shaw wrote:
> > > Erwin Rol wrote:
> > > > What about the GNU C-library, that is LGPL. Does that make it
> > > > "unacceptable" for you to use Xorg on Linux ?
> > > 
> > > The C lib is mostly generic functionality that can be easily
> > > found from other sources and under various licences. Glib is
> > > a one-off specific api, which would force the one and only
> > > Glib to be required.
> > 
> > Well one could always rewrite glib (or the parts that would be needed)
> > if one really needs a completely closed source system which includes
> > Xorg :-)
> 
> Yes, because writing our own build system worked so well.
> 
> X.Org is not an OS vendor.  We do not build toolchains.  Nor build
> systems.
> 
> Every hour that we spend maintaining this sort of stuff is an hour that
> could be better spent actually, y'know, working on X.

Exactly, so just use glib, and let the people that really want a closed
source Xorg setup rewrite glib with a different license. That way the
Xorg developers can now focus on Xorg, since glib is here now. And AFAIK
the LGPL does not cause any licensing problems in combination with
X/MIT. 

And gnome/gtk are used on a lot of non Linux systems that also use Xorg,
like *BSD and Solaris, so those systems already have the LGPL glib. And
even OS/X and Windows have glib versions. 

So I think glib wouldn't be that bad of a choice. 

- Erwin





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