X.Org Foundation - Release Call - 3rd May 2004

[Branden Robinson]

On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 04:43:57PM +0100, Howard Greenwell wrote:
> 3. Contents of next release/schedule.
> 
> Alan Hourihane has been updating the XFree86 tree? Jim asked if anyone
> knows the status.  Tungsten Graphics contracts require people to
> integrate their work on the XFree86 tree.  Need to investigate changes
> that have been made.

I have a few questions:

1) Does Alan have a policy regarding the license of the contributions he
   makes to the XFree86 CVS repository?
2) Does Alan use the XFree86 1.1 or X-Oz licenses?
3) Does anything in the Tungsten Graphics contract forbid people from
   integrating their work into other trees as well?

> Jim and Daniel both complain about CVS, and would like to see another
> alternative.

I'd love to help out with a Subversion installation, but I am concerned
about (inadvertent) XFree86 1.1 license contamination given recent
statements by David Dawes[1][2][3].  (Whether such statements can
reasonably be interpreted to have retroactive effect is quite open to
debate, but I've personally had zero luck getting answers to concrete
questions from XFree86 regarding the licensing situation.)

Let me also take this opportunity to pimp my "sanitized" XFree86
snapshot[4][5] as a resource for anyone who may find it useful.  It is
XFree86 CVS as of 2004-02-12 (a day when there were no commits, and the
day before the XFree86 1.1 license was imposed), with all files affected
by the X-Oz license deleted or dialed back to the revisions immediately
prior to that commit.  This tree should therefore be free of any of the
problematic X-Oz or XFree86 1.1 license clauses.  Please note, however,
that it doesn't "sanitize" the tree of anything else (e.g., Debian finds
some fonts and documentation to have licenses which fail the DFSG, but
that's not really germane to this particular task -- in any case, some
folks don't give two hoots about the DFSG).

What I'd *really* like to be able to offer is a proper copy of the
XFree86 CVS repo, filtered as above, but I haven't had time to prepare
such a thing yet.  The advantage to that is that ViewCVS could be bolted
onto it and there'd never be a reason to visit cvsweb.xfree86.org and
potentially contaminate oneself by viewing code under the new license.
Also, such a thing would be an ideal input for Karl Fogel's cvs2svn
tools, if people feel SVN is a worthwhile revision-control system.

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/devel%40xfree86.org/msg05906.html
[2] http://www.mail-archive.com/devel%40xfree86.org/msg05959.html
[3] http://www.mail-archive.com/devel%40xfree86.org/msg05939.html
[4] http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/xsf/XFree86/xfree86-CVS-pre-4.4.0-RC3-new-license-sanitized/
[5] http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/xsf/XFree86/xfree86-CVS-pre-4.4.0-RC3-new-license-sanitized.tar.gz

-- 
G. Branden Robinson            |         The software said it required
Free Software Developer        |         Windows 3.1 or better, so I
branden at deadbeast.net          |         installed Linux.
http://deadbeast.net/~branden/ |
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