Wayland not MIT-licensed / FAQ wrong

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Thu, 04 Jun 2015 22:17:44 +0200
Markus Slopianka <kamikazow at gmx.de> wrote:

> Good news: I asked by FSFE lawyer buddy. He said that since basically all 
> simply assumed that it's the MIT license, the wrongly pasted license header 
> would constitute a wrongly attached label and be "Falsa demonstratio non 
> nocet" (that legal term has a German and a Finnish Wikipedia article), 
> therefore changing it should be no problem (especially since the two licenses 
> are very similar anyway).
> 
> In case you're wondering who I spoke to: Michael Stehmann 
> <http://www.rechtsanwalt-stehmann.de/>, also known by his nick Mikeadvo, local 
> FSFE "guru", married to a Debian contributor, personal friend of Werner Koch 
> (you know: the GnuPG guy), etc.
> I think his "judgment" should carry enough weight.

Hi,

thank you! Yes, I am convinced now. :-)
Any reason he's not in CC here, btw?

Though it might be arguable whether people thought of MIT license or
the actual license text we used, I suppose we can proceed in "opt-out"
rather than "opt-in" fashion then:

- notify people explicitly that we are going to do this, also for new
  files using the old license text that get in during the waiting time
  (patch cover letter)
- publish patches to change the license text
- wait a reasonable time (say, to the mid-point of the main 1.9
  development cycle?) for opposition - I'm sure Phoronix will do the
  advertising for us...
- if no opposition, push and be done with it.

To be clear, by "opt-in" I mean having to extract an acknowledgement
from every single contributor... err, copyright holder listed in git
history, which I assume is what we should've done if this counted as
relicensing.

Dear community, which MIT license?

The license recommended in
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/tree/COPYING
is the same as
http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
so that is the one, right?

It is the same as what is called "expat" at
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat


Thanks,
pq