Synaptics MIT license, again

[Kean Johnston]

> Of course - or someone could provide some sort of argument more 
> compelling than "more people might possibly work on the driver". The 
> Synaptics driver isn't terribly important, but it's likely that there 
> are going to be more (L)GPL drivers appearing over time. If that 
> situation doesn't seem desirable, then people will actually have to make 
> some sort of statement as to why.
Unfortunately that isnt possible without devolving into the my-
license-is-better-than-your-license debate which is very old and
worn out by now. In the end, I guess it comes down to the personal
choice of the developer. If they write free software because they
want the maximum number of people possible to be able to use their
code, they can use the MIT license. If they write free software
because they want to promote the agenda of free software, they
can use the GNU licenses. Thats about the difference between them.

I personally think that the X.org attitude is the correct one,
that the core stuff should all be under the MIT license. If any
driver vendor cares enough to see their code shipped with the
katamari releases, they will simply need to toe the line. If they
don't care about that, they don't. Any not-so-open X vendors that
want to provide GPL'ed drivers will have to do so outside of the
main X packages, so that they are not affected by the viral aspect
of the license. This will raise the bar for acceptance of those
drivers by such not-so-open X vendors, but thats probably exactly
what the people who are fans of the GPL want anyway.