On 2025/06/25 5:21, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
Chris Adams wrote:Given the questionable changes made to X.Org by the lead (only?) developer of X11Libre before being removed from the project, including possible license violationsThe "license violations" are actually moving a few lines of mostly trivial declarations from one header file to another without copying the copyright notice. As I wrote in https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/veto-x11libre-replacing-xorg-for-fedora/155926/77 :
If you are going to dig into the issue, might as well go all the way.
The `misc.h` file where this originated has been licensed under
`MIT AND X11` since the beginning when the code was written 13
years ago [1]. Whether or not a specific snippet makes sense to
have a specific copyright handling is not a valid debate. They
could have either moved the code with an over complete copyright
notice or asked permission from all the relevant authors of the
snippet, which they did not do.
The only explanation I could give is that when they moved the
code and wrote it as `MIT OR X11` would be that they thought it
meant "I don't know, this code might have be under MIT or X11"
instead of "you can use *everything* in here as either MIT or
X11". And to be fair, the upstream `COPYING` file does not
explicitly note the license they use and they have an easy to
misinterpret segment `MIT/X11`, which could be viewed as a
deprecated OR operator in the cargo ecosystem, but I doubt that
was the intent in the COPYING file [2].
But the main issue I see is that when confronted with the
licensing issue, those comments were never addressed [3] even
though the person in question was not banned for another 2
months. It hints that this is a symptom of them not handling
such a big project appropriately.
Also in the post you mentioned
And the fix would be to get the copyright notice and the SPDX declaration on that new header file fixed
Well, have you submitted a PR for that? You are probably among the few qualified to work with that upstream given the tone in the README.
They have plenty of opportunities to show that they want to
improve the project in a non-hostile manner, but given that the
README remains unchanged despite a couple of PRs that suggests
toning down the voice (among other gems that you can find in the
issue/PR discussions), makes me doubt that that will be taken
seriously.
[1]:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/commit/2abe83df686ed64c4f4df711ac3c1fd12131c2e4
[2]:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/blob/master/COPYING?ref_type=heads#L49-51
[3]:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/1804
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