Wayland not MIT-licensed / FAQ wrong

[Kristian Høgsberg]

Yes, it appears you're correct. The HPND license is widely used in X
(even new additions such as
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/tree/dri3/dri3.c) and I think
I assumed it was the most recent/modern version of the MIT license. It
was certainly the intention to change the license to MIT and that's
what all contributors acknowledged when we relicensed. Let's wait a
few days and see if anybody objects, but otherwise I think it'd be
fine to just change the Wayland and Weston licenses to the actual MIT
license.

Kristian

On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 5:06 AM, Markus Slopianka <kamikazow at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hi there.
> I'm one of the authors of Wayland's Wikipedia article
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%28display_server_protocol%29>.
> While writing it we noticed some discrepancies in your licensing.
>
> Your FAQ states that Wayland is MIT-licensed
> <http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_1> although the actual
> license text <http://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/tree/COPYING> uses
> the wording from the deprecated Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer
> (HPND) license <http://opensource.org/licenses/HPND>.
>
> This, btw, also leads to the weird situation that this particular wording has
> not been declared a Free Software license and GPL-compatible by the FSF (even
> though there are no clauses that would prevent that).
>
> The HPND is also not just a simple re-wording of the MIT license because the
> HPND carries a no-promotion clause like §3 of the 3-clause BSD license
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#3-clause>.
>
> The easy but still awkward solution (because the HPND is deprecated) is to
> simply fix the FAQ.
> However, I'd suggest to replace the HPND text with the 3-clause BSD license.
> The 3-clause BSD license is functionally the same, just with different wording.
> As such replacing the license text would IMO not be a re-licensing of Wayland
> in the sense that each developer (or 95%, according to Mozilla
> <https://blogs.fsfe.org/ciaran/?p=58>) would have to agree with it.
> As I see it, it would merely be a editorial change like correcting bad grammar
> or a typo.
>
> Markus
>
> _______________________________________________
> wayland-devel mailing list
> wayland-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/wayland-devel