The XGL development model [LWN.net]

The XGL development model

Posted Dec 22, 2005 10:51 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647)
In reply to: The XGL development model by cventers
Parent article: The XGL development model

I've a strong feeling a move to GPL xorg would go over about as well as
the move to add the advertising clause to xfree86 did... resulting in the
split.

Xorg is MIT licensed for a reason, and I seriously doubt the BSDs and
perhaps certain other private interests (slaveryware Unix, altho they are
a dieing breed and now just depend on xorg, for the most part) would be
interested in that changing. Xorg got virtually everybody on board to
maintain the MIT licensed one, and even if there were some theoretical
interest in a GPLed version, I don't believe anyone involved is interested
in going thru another split over the issue, so it's not going to happen.

Duncan

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The XGL development model

Posted Dec 22, 2005 12:37 UTC (Thu) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link]

Yes we still raise it as a theoretical over beers, and apparently when the XFree86 crap went on, a number of companies seriously thought about just forking the whole lot into a GPL tree, lucky enough the X.org Foundation picked up the ball, but if that hadn't come about, a relicensed GPL X server might have actually happened.

At this stage unless something seriously goes wrong with the X.org model I don't think there'll be any real talk of doing anything of the sort. I'd personally like to fork my private X server and remove all support for anything backwards compatible or old world just to see how small the source tarball would be :-), but kdrive is pretty much down that road already.