Yeelong and SiliconMotion driver: asking for developers

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 02:49:13PM -0400, Brett Smith wrote:
> When we started looking at software for the SiliconMotion hardware (as
> part of evaluating how free software-friendly a particular machine was),
> we found a modified driver from the SiliconMotion company that seemed to
> have some useful changes.  The company was distributing it under GPLv2
> only.
> 
> Some of the developers who were packaging software for the machine
> pointed out that this license was unfortunate for them, because they
> were interested in getting GRUB running on the box as well, and of
> course, GPLv2-only is not a compatible license for a GPLv3-covered
> project like GRUB.  With that issue in front of him, RMS asked
> SiliconMotion to allow the code to be used under the terms of GPLv3, one
> way or another, which they agreed to.
> 
> Please don't read any malice into that request, because I assure you
> there was none.  The FSF has consistently advocated that developers
> should use licenses that are consistent with the larger projects they
> interact with (as long as those licenses are free and GPL-compatible),
> and that advice definitely applies to Xorg drivers.  If we made a
> mistake here, it was a failure to connect the dots.  As weird as it
> might sound, I don't think it was clear at the time that we were talking
> about the licensing of an entire Xorg driver.  If we had known that, we
> would've asked SiliconMotion to switch to the X11 license, if possible,
> to stay consistent with Xorg generally.
> 
> And I'm happy to talk to SiliconMotion about that now.  I don't know if
> you have a usual way of handling licensing requests like this, but if
> you want me to keep anybody or any lists in the loop on that thread,
> that's no problem either; just let me know.  And either way, if you have
> any other questions or concerns about this, please don't hesitate to ask
> me.

Fair enough -- sorry if my reply was a bit harsh.  It'd be great if you
guys were willing to work with SMI to get it relicensed to MIT/X11, as
for better or worse, we only accept MIT/X11 or non-four-clause BSD.  We
do host the development of some GPL drivers (xf86-input-synaptics,
xf86-video-avivo), but we don't distribute these as a part of X.Org at
all.  Even so, these are GPLv2 rather than GPLv3, which would be a lot
more problematic.

For legal issues, the Foundation Board (board at foundation.x.org) handles
all of that, and just ask the list or myself about technical stuff (SMI
driver, code hosting, etc).

Cheers,
Daniel
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