Xorg Now GPL??

[Dave Airlie]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 6:17 AM, Marc Balmer <marc at msys.ch> wrote:
> * Paulo Cesar Pereira de Andrade wrote:
>> Adam Jackson wrote:
>> > On Wed, 2008-08-27 at 15:59 +0100, Bill Crawford wrote:
>> >>> Yes, but the people who can't accept it generally aren't the ones contributing, AFAICS.
>> >> You might want to look at the list of corporate contributors to the X
>> >> server codebase over the years ...
>> >
>> > With my red hat on: Changing the license of the server to some version
>> > of GPL would make some things better and some things worse.  We'd have
>> > more libraries we'd be allowed to consume, so could potentially spend
>> > less time reinventing wheels; on the downside, we could lose a
>> > significant number of external contributors, which is not something the
>> > project can really afford since we're wildly understaffed as it is, and
>> > it would invite even more armchair lawyering.
>> >
>> > Given that it would solve no problems we're currently experiencing, and
>> > would introduce new ones, we don't see any point in relicensing.
>>
>>   It would most likely cause some (hopefully) short term problems. But
>> in the long run, it would be better and should attract more contributors.
>> Also, a fork probably would be positive, as people usually work better
>> when there is "an opposite side"; someone they want to prove they are
>> better (sorry can't express very well in english but I think I exposed
>> the idea).
>>
>>   It would require rewriting a lot of code also, to become fully GPL,
>> but at start would be just accepting GPL code.
>
> becoming fully GPL would be the end X.  The GPL is not a free license.
>

Yes that would happen, X would just suddenly stop if it was relicense,
you might look
at the major contributors to X.org at the moment and who funds them,

apart from Alan at Sun and Matthieu from OpenBSD, nearly everyone else
that contributes to core X
comes from a Linux company or Linux supporting company (ignoring Apple
for now as they mainly do non-core work).

We'd probably also alienate Nvidia.

I'm not saying switching to GPL would ever be a good thing, I am
saying you are over estimating the importance of your opinion.

Dave.