On Thu, 11 Jun 2015 18:10:07 -0700 Bryce Harrington <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 10:56:10AM +0300, Pekka Paalanen wrote: > > On Wed, 10 Jun 2015 11:55:12 -0700 > > Bryce Harrington <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > MIT has released software under several slightly different licenses, > > > including the old 'X11 License' or 'MIT License'. Some code under this > > > license was in fact included in X.org's Xserver in the past. However, > > > X.org now prefers the MIT Expat License as the standard (which, > > > confusingly, is also referred to as the 'MIT License'). See > > > http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/tree/COPYING > > > > > > When Wayland started, it was Kristian Høgsberg's intent to license it > > > compatibly with X.org. "I wanted Wayland to be usable (license-wise) > > > whereever X was usable." But, the text of the older X11 License was > > > taken for Wayland, rather than X11's current standard. This patch > > > corrects this by swapping in the intended text. > > > > > > In practical terms, the most notable change is the dropping of the > > > no-advertising clause. > > > > > > Signed-off-by: Bryce Harrington <[email protected]> > > > --- > > > COPYING | 33 +++++++++++++++++---------------- > > > 1 file changed, 17 insertions(+), 16 deletions(-) ... > Your review comments so far sound like you are on the fence but leaning > towards the version that excludes the "next-paragraph" phrase. > > I had noticed this discrepancy right off the bat when starting on this, > and gave it a lot of study and thought before including it. So let me > offer some points to perhaps tilt you over the other direction, because > I think that is the better decision. > > 1. First off I agree with you it probably doesn't matter. This is a > tiny nit. > > 2. Wayland and Weston already include several files, like > vaapi-recorder.c, weston-egl.ext.h, etc. which were already covered > by this form of the license. > > 3. Since X.org uses this wording in their boilerplate, files we pull > from them in the future will include it. OTOH I don't know of any > sources we might pull from that would be using the > non-"next-paragraph" form. This is a practical inconvenience we > will (presumably) hit, and so I weigh this point higher than the > others. > > 4. While there is a benefit to being able to say, "This is the exact, > 100% pure, unadulterated MIT Expat License," I see this benefit as > being pretty tiny. Indeed the name "MIT Expat License" is my own > invention; near as I can tell it's generally either called "Expat > License" or "MIT License". I chose the more wordy name so it's > clearer to folks that we're merely doing a MIT -> MIT license > switch. If I posted that we're switching from "X11 License to Expat > License" it might cause consternation among folks that don't know > wtf Expat License means. Maybe "MIT License (Expat-style)" would > have been even clearer. > > 5. There aren't really many places where we specifically mention the > license by name. (In fact, apart from this patch I don't think we > mention it anywhere. I could be wrong but it's extremely minimal at > best.) > > So, to sum up, I don't really think it matters at all whether Wayland is > "pure Expat" or "Expat with a slight tweak to match X". From what I can > tell we don't "need" the pure Expat form for anything specifically, but > we will have to deal with the next-paragraph variant. So from a > pratical standpoint, it's going to be simpler going forward if we adopt > the "next-paragraph" variant to match with X.org. If we do that then I > think we can just use that variant and never need to deal with the other > style. Hi, yup, that's all fine. I just went overboard with the "can we call this thing the MIT license?" since that was what started all this. I have verified the new COPYING file against the opensource.org MIT license and xserver COPYING file. I have verified the new COPYING file against the src/wayland-utils.c. Then I did $ find . -name '*.[ch]' -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 sh -c 'diff -u src/wayland-util.c "$@" | head -n30' diff | less and verified that all the new license texts are identical to the one in wayland-utils.c The indent in cursor/cursor-data.h is off, but that doesn't matter, the text is identical. Note, that cursor/convert_font.c contains a license text to be printed on its output, which is the old license text of cursor-data.h. Should something be done to that too? On my personal behalf, patches 1 - 6 and 8 - 11 are: Reviewed-by: Pekka Paalanen <[email protected]> Excellent work, Bryce! One more file still contains the old license text: publican/sources/Book_Info.xml Thanks, pq _______________________________________________ wayland-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/wayland-devel
