Making the GPL more scary [LWN.net]

Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 22, 2018 20:41 UTC (Mon) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
In reply to: Making the GPL more scary by k8to
Parent article: Making the GPL more scary

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.

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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.