GPL and missing licenses in xf86-input-keyboard? (was Re: [ANNOUNCE] xf86-input-keyboard1.2.2)

[Alan Coopersmith]

Paulo Cesar Pereira de Andrade wrote:
>   I am not talking exactly about forcing vendors to release source, but 
> a way to attract more talented developers and hopefully some of them 
> with full access/knowledge about the hardware, maybe an employee 
> contributing directly to Xorg. 

I have never heard anyone say "I'd work on X only if it's license was
GPL"  - have you?   Why would you think GPL vs. X11/MIT license is the
only thing stopping them?

Frankly, all I can see us getting out of a switch of licenses is a lot
of work for little to no gain, and a lot of arguments over whether GPL
causes problems for binary drivers or not.

Personally, and probably even from the Sun perspective, a license such
as LGPL, MPL or CDDL that said "you must share your changes to this code,
but you can link with code under other licenses, even closed" would be
okay, if there was some reason to think that would actually be worth the
work involved.   Even GPL with a clear statement that we didn't expect
loadable modules to be covered could work, but there's so many other
things to work on than updating the license of all the code involved,
that I don't see it being a useful use of time.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering