On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 6:36 PM, Daniel Stone <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 02:49:13PM -0400, Brett Smith wrote: >> When we started looking at software for the SiliconMotion hardware (as >> part of evaluating how free software-friendly a particular machine was), >> we found a modified driver from the SiliconMotion company that seemed to >> have some useful changes. The company was distributing it under GPLv2 >> only. >> >> Some of the developers who were packaging software for the machine >> pointed out that this license was unfortunate for them, because they >> were interested in getting GRUB running on the box as well, and of >> course, GPLv2-only is not a compatible license for a GPLv3-covered >> project like GRUB. With that issue in front of him, RMS asked >> SiliconMotion to allow the code to be used under the terms of GPLv3, one >> way or another, which they agreed to. >> >> Please don't read any malice into that request, because I assure you >> there was none. The FSF has consistently advocated that developers >> should use licenses that are consistent with the larger projects they >> interact with (as long as those licenses are free and GPL-compatible), >> and that advice definitely applies to Xorg drivers. If we made a >> mistake here, it was a failure to connect the dots. As weird as it >> might sound, I don't think it was clear at the time that we were talking >> about the licensing of an entire Xorg driver. If we had known that, we >> would've asked SiliconMotion to switch to the X11 license, if possible, >> to stay consistent with Xorg generally. >> >> And I'm happy to talk to SiliconMotion about that now. I don't know if >> you have a usual way of handling licensing requests like this, but if >> you want me to keep anybody or any lists in the loop on that thread, >> that's no problem either; just let me know. And either way, if you have >> any other questions or concerns about this, please don't hesitate to ask >> me. > > Fair enough -- sorry if my reply was a bit harsh. It'd be great if you > guys were willing to work with SMI to get it relicensed to MIT/X11, as > for better or worse, we only accept MIT/X11 or non-four-clause BSD. We > do host the development of some GPL drivers (xf86-input-synaptics, > xf86-video-avivo), but we don't distribute these as a part of X.Org at > all. Even so, these are GPLv2 rather than GPLv3, which would be a lot > more problematic.
FWIW, SMI has been involved in the siliconmotion xorg driver before (they contributed a fair amount of the original code), although most of the recent work has been done by contributors. Alex _______________________________________________ [email protected]: X.Org support Archives: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg Info: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
