Non-free (?) GLX code under GLX Public License and SGI Free Software Licence B

[Carsten Agger]

> On Wed, May 07, 2008 at 07:34:45AM +0200, Carsten Agger wrote:

> Their legal team are going to want to vet every line of both the license
> and the code (yes, again).  There will be interminable meetings about it
> with the legal team and 'all relevant stakeholders', and even these will
> have a perceived cost.  In the end, it will come down to a lot of money
> (some justified, some not), and the legal team and everyone else will
> demand a business reason as to why they should spend this money.  Also,
> they'll want a compelling (to their bottom line, not to a bunch of
> bearded people who care about the difference between free software and
> open source) reason to change anything at all.  It's worked well so far,
> right?
>
> That's pretty much what you're up against.  Maybe 10 years ago, you
> would've had a chance, but I doubt SGI are really that interested in
> development, X, or development of X these days.  If it's not helping
> them shift hardware ...
>

OK, so what you're saying is that if this problem is to be solved, the GLX
code needs to be rewritten, and in the meantime downstream distros should
either accept the bug (as Debian and Ubuntu are currently doing) or remove
the offending code(as gNewsSencse has done).

And if, as Dave hinted at, this code is effectively orphaned, relicensing
would be even more difficult.

Thanks for the input. How big a priority would changing this be for the
X.org project? "Nice to do", "need to do", "eventually", kind of scale of
things? As you said, it's probably hardly an afternoon's work.

br
Carsten