Making the GPL more scary [LWN.net]

Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 19, 2018 17:30 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566)
In reply to: Making the GPL more scary by mirabilos
Parent article: Making the GPL more scary

By many accounts PostgreSQL is also better at being a JSON document store than most of these single-function services, MongoDB included. The company just XFree86'ed itself.

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Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 19, 2018 22:51 UTC (Fri) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (5 responses)

A friend (also my employer’s professional DBA and Horracle admin, although I got him to like PostgreSQL while he was teaching me SQL) said he couldn’t have expressed that better ;)

I’m a bit concerned about trying to coin something negative with XFree86 here, though. I looked, at that time, and the “new” licence was not different from anything that was in the tree before. Rather, that was FUD allowing the “others” to split off to X.org while somewhat keeping face. I think they had disagreements before. I also met one of the two devs left, and had mail contact with the other, and both were quite nice; development went down though, I guess the development model of XFree86 and the volunteer time just were “over” and a new age had begun but elsewhere.

Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 22, 2018 20:25 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (3 responses)

Huh? There was definitely a license change at the core of the XFree86 abandonment, it's just that when the issue bubbled up, it had been committed a number of months prior.

Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 22, 2018 20:41 UTC (Mon) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (2 responses)

There was a change of the terms on a few files, yes, but not to a new licence. That licence was in use prior to that.

And the licence is basically equivalent to the 4-clause BSD licence.

Making the GPL more scary

Posted Nov 1, 2018 5:49 UTC (Thu) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, a clause which enormous effort had gone into almost everywhere else to *eliminate*.

At heart, it was a legal reflection of a complete breakdown of collegial relations between an old guard who had commit access (including several, like Wexelblat, who had gone over to Windows and hadn't worked on the project in many years) and the "punks" who wanted to bring X, insomuch as it was possible to do so while maintaining wire protocol compatibility, into the modern world.

Since the punks were doing the work and had backing from the distributions, the fork had a fairly preordained outcome, which can't usually be said about forks. And the rapid pace of development after the damage was routed around speaks for itself. In particular, the release of a modular X11 with a mainstream build system was achieved in relatively short order, an enormous step forward.

(When was the last time anyone ran "xmkmf"?)

Making the GPL more scary

Posted Nov 1, 2018 19:51 UTC (Thu) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]

Me, last thundersday, when I was debugging the build of magicpoint in Debian.

Unfortunately, imake in X.org is in a pretty bad state, and I had to override many variables during the make invocation to make it work.

Making the GPL more scary

Posted Nov 1, 2018 8:33 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> I also met one of the two devs left, and had mail contact with the other, and both were quite nice; development went down though,

As I understood it, Keith Packard was doing maybe 90% of the dev work. As he was also one of the most (negatively) affected people by the politics - of which the licence change was a minor part - it's not a surprise that XFree86 development pretty much stopped when he left.

Cheers,
Wol