compile problem synaptics driver against 6.8.99.15

[Christoph Brill]

Here is a copy&paste of an email that hut me two weeks ago from Warren
Turkal:

> I noticed that you are involved with the synaptics driver for Xorg.
> Could you please get me a list of people who developed the thing? I
> did some work a while ago on getting it relicensed. I managed to
> contact all but one person. I don't remember who it was though. Maybe
> we could work together and see if we can reconcile my work before and
> find the missing person.

He sounds motivated ;) Ok, at least he has seems to have a list of the
devs of the synaptics driver. I cc him.

Regards,
  Christoph


Am Montag, den 15.08.2005, 11:23 -0400 schrieb Mike A. Harris:
> Christoph Brill wrote:
> > I guess they could. I played with to provided Makefile to do that, but
> > it didn't work that well. "Biggest" problem is, that you need the X.org
> > SDK to build it.
> > Sadly the license of synaptics is incompatible with X.org's and the
> > original author(s) are unreachable to ask them for a license
> > change :( So it will never get merged into X.org ...
> 
> My last recollection is that the authors were contacted, and
> agreed to relicense it as MIT for inclusion in X.Org, but nobody
> ever followed up on the matter to see it happen.
> 
> We ship the GPL'd module in separate rpm packaging currently,
> and plan on splitting all modules into their own rpms for X11R7,
> and I know various other distros plan on doing so also.  With
> this type of setup, I'm not sure if it's worth the trouble to
> integrate more drivers into the Xorg implementation, as they
> are fairly easily maintained by external maintainers anyway.
> 
> If someone is still interested in seeing it merged though, we'll
> need to see a volunteer highly motivated to see the process
> through from start to finish, who will have to dig up the old
> emails from the synaptics authors I suppose in mailing list
> archives.  I don't remember which lists they were in, but I'd
> search xfree86/xpert/devel/forum/etc at xfree86.org as well as
> the various xorg lists.  Other X developers might have saved
> the emails somewhere easier to get at too, which might help
> any would-be volunteers get started.
> 
> Hope this helps...
>