Synaptics MIT license approved

[Christoph Brill]

Am Mittwoch, den 16.05.2007, 14:17 -0700 schrieb Alan Coopersmith:
> Christoph Brill wrote:
> > I also have been told that MIT/X11 license is incompatible with GPLv2.
> > If that is not the fact, why was I told that this driver can never be
> > shipped with the X.org sources?
> 
> GPL adds restrictions to distributors that X.Org has traditionally wanted
> to avoid, such as the requirement that source be provided for all parts,
> which would lead to the same endless arguments over the ATI & nVidia closed
> drivers that infest the various Linux forums.
> 
> GPL software can include MIT/X11 code, just as it can BSD code, but for
> MIT/X11 code to include GPL code, it needs to accept the additional terms
> of the GPL that go beyond the MIT/X11 terms.

Ok, if I understand that all correctly I will send a mail to the developers.
This might lead to this mail which will NEED to be reviewed before I send it
out.

"Hello developer/contributor,

we asked you earlier on changing the license of the synaptics X11 driver from
GPLv2 to MIT/X11. All developers/contributors agreed on changing the license.

The reason stated in the original approach was that we thought that "GPLv2 was
incompatible with MIT/X11". We've been told that this is not true. Sorry about
that. X.org simply does not accept the GPLv2 license since they would need to
be able to ship all the driver sources. As you know this is impossible for
binary-only proprietary modules.

We also stated that the driver does not run with the latest X.org release. This
is not true either. The last release of the driver does not work with the last
X.org release, but the unreleased development version of the driver does.

If don't want to change the license from GPLv2 to X11/MIT based on these new
facts, please inform me.

We still need to change the license to MIT/X11 to couple it more tightly to
X.org. It will defintely help the driver be to located at the same location
as the rest of the X.org sources.

Sorry for the inconvenience,
  Christoph Brill"