[PATCH 01/11] COPYING: Update to MIT Expat License rather than MIT X License

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Thu, 11 Jun 2015 18:10:07 -0700
Bryce Harrington <bryce at osg.samsung.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 10:56:10AM +0300, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
> > On Wed, 10 Jun 2015 11:55:12 -0700
> > Bryce Harrington <bryce at osg.samsung.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > MIT has released software under several slightly different licenses,
> > > including the old 'X11 License' or 'MIT License'.  Some code under this
> > > license was in fact included in X.org's Xserver in the past.  However,
> > > X.org now prefers the MIT Expat License as the standard (which,
> > > confusingly, is also referred to as the 'MIT License').  See
> > > http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/tree/COPYING
> > > 
> > > When Wayland started, it was Kristian Høgsberg's intent to license it
> > > compatibly with X.org.  "I wanted Wayland to be usable (license-wise)
> > > whereever X was usable."  But, the text of the older X11 License was
> > > taken for Wayland, rather than X11's current standard.  This patch
> > > corrects this by swapping in the intended text.
> > > 
> > > In practical terms, the most notable change is the dropping of the
> > > no-advertising clause.
> > > 
> > > Signed-off-by: Bryce Harrington <bryce at osg.samsung.com>
> > > ---
> > >  COPYING | 33 +++++++++++++++++----------------
> > >  1 file changed, 17 insertions(+), 16 deletions(-)

...

> Your review comments so far sound like you are on the fence but leaning
> towards the version that excludes the "next-paragraph" phrase.
> 
> I had noticed this discrepancy right off the bat when starting on this,
> and gave it a lot of study and thought before including it.  So let me
> offer some points to perhaps tilt you over the other direction, because
> I think that is the better decision.
> 
> 1.  First off I agree with you it probably doesn't matter.  This is a
>     tiny nit.
> 
> 2.  Wayland and Weston already include several files, like
>     vaapi-recorder.c, weston-egl.ext.h, etc. which were already covered
>     by this form of the license.
> 
> 3.  Since X.org uses this wording in their boilerplate, files we pull
>     from them in the future will include it.  OTOH I don't know of any
>     sources we might pull from that would be using the
>     non-"next-paragraph" form.  This is a practical inconvenience we
>     will (presumably) hit, and so I weigh this point higher than the
>     others.
> 
> 4.  While there is a benefit to being able to say, "This is the exact,
>     100% pure, unadulterated MIT Expat License," I see this benefit as
>     being pretty tiny.  Indeed the name "MIT Expat License" is my own
>     invention; near as I can tell it's generally either called "Expat
>     License" or "MIT License".  I chose the more wordy name so it's
>     clearer to folks that we're merely doing a MIT -> MIT license
>     switch.  If I posted that we're switching from "X11 License to Expat
>     License" it might cause consternation among folks that don't know
>     wtf Expat License means.  Maybe "MIT License (Expat-style)" would
>     have been even clearer.
> 
> 5.  There aren't really many places where we specifically mention the
>     license by name.  (In fact, apart from this patch I don't think we
>     mention it anywhere.  I could be wrong but it's extremely minimal at
>     best.)
> 
> So, to sum up, I don't really think it matters at all whether Wayland is
> "pure Expat" or "Expat with a slight tweak to match X".  From what I can
> tell we don't "need" the pure Expat form for anything specifically, but
> we will have to deal with the next-paragraph variant.  So from a
> pratical standpoint, it's going to be simpler going forward if we adopt
> the "next-paragraph" variant to match with X.org.  If we do that then I
> think we can just use that variant and never need to deal with the other
> style.

Hi,

yup, that's all fine. I just went overboard with the "can we call this
thing the MIT license?" since that was what started all this.

I have verified the new COPYING file against the opensource.org MIT
license and xserver COPYING file. I have verified the new COPYING file
against the src/wayland-utils.c.

Then I did
$ find . -name '*.[ch]' -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 sh -c 'diff -u src/wayland-util.c "$@" | head -n30' diff | less

and verified that all the new license texts are identical to the one in
wayland-utils.c The indent in cursor/cursor-data.h is off, but that
doesn't matter, the text is identical.

Note, that cursor/convert_font.c contains a license text to be printed
on its output, which is the old license text of cursor-data.h. Should
something be done to that too?


On my personal behalf, patches 1 - 6 and 8 - 11 are:
Reviewed-by: Pekka Paalanen <pekka.paalanen at collabora.co.uk>

Excellent work, Bryce!


One more file still contains the old license text:
publican/sources/Book_Info.xml


Thanks,
pq