[KLUG Members] Sorry to see this

[Peter Buxton]

As seen on http://www.xfree.org/mission.html :

> The primary goal of the XFree86 Project is to produce XFree86(tm) 
> and to make it the best freely-redistributable Open Source
> implementation of the X Window System by implementing it on as many
> hardware and software platforms as possible, by enhancing and
> extending it to meet the needs of new hardware and software platforms
> and by licensing it in a manner that is the same as or equivalent in
> spirit to the original MIT/X licence.

Okay, cool.

> The Project seeks to work towards this goal in a manner that gives the
> strongest weight to the technical integrity of the ideas,
> implementation, and individuals involved, with the commercial
> viability and influences from commercial or political interests being
> non-goals and explicitly not addressed.

Um, not cool.

Now, there's nothing in that second sentence that Linus Torvalds
wouldn't approve of. (Or RMS, for that matter.) Many FS/OSS projects are
based on like principles. But judging from the content of the mail
archive at:

http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/forum/

all I can say is that sentence A, coming from person B, is perfectly
reasonable, and the same sentence coming from person C is simply a
frightening threat.

This, http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/forum/2003-April/000948.html :

> I fail to understand why, if you don't like the way this particular
> group of people does things, you don't go off and do it differently
> yourself.  There's nothing stopping you.

is nonsense coming from a man who helped excommunicate Keith Packard
from XFree86 core for trying to create an additional developer
community. I can't imagine Torvalds treating Alan Cox, a Red Hat
employee and (co-)creator of the biggest Linux fork ever, AKA the Red
Hat kernel, the way David Dawes has treated Keith Packard, who's worked
on X11 *consistently* since 1983 (Tektronix, Inc., MIT X Consortium,
Network Computing Devices, SuSE Linux and now HP).

Keith Packard has written, or contributed to:

X Shape extension
X RandR extension
X Render extension (anti-aliasd fonts)
fontconfig
X Display Manager Control Protocol

As for Mr Dawes: If you're going to dedicate all your time writing code
for CORE, for the benefit of people CORE wants to benefit, and you're
going to control who is in CORE for the benefit of CORE.... then you
need to license your work in such a way that all rights are reserved to
CORE, shouldn't you?

But I do agree. Nothing is stopping Mr Packard.

-- 
Though nothing is wasted, everything is spent. -- A. Dillard