From kragen@dnaco.net Wed Aug 26 11:45:40 1998 Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 11:45:38 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen To: shap@eros.cis.upenn.edu cc: fsb@crynwr.com Subject: Re: Can open source cost money? In-Reply-To: <199808261230.IAA12855@cis.upenn.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 1453 Status: O X-Status: On Wed, 26 Aug 1998 shap@eros.cis.upenn.edu wrote: > For those who may not know, the group that controls X11 (I think it's > the X consortium -- not sure) has just decided to require a royalty if > the X11 system is bundled in a product that is charged for. Not just *any* X11 system. Only the *latest* X11 system. You can still distribute XFree86, or an older version of the reference X11 system, freely, and the XFree folks have said they would not use the new, encumbered X11 code. The X Consortium has been dismantled, and the Open Group (formerly OSF) is doing the further work on X (and has also had the copyrights transferred to it). > It doesn't appear to have occurred to anyone there that this > constitutes a breach of contract with all of the people who have > donated work to the X consortium over the years. It most certainly does not. If those people had wanted to prevent this from happening, they could have used the GPL. They didn't -- they used the X11 license, which was designed *specifically* to allow this, partly because that's what the Unix vendors wanted -- to be able to charge money to their customers for the X system, and prevent their customers from redistributing said X system. (It is worthy of note, in this context, that the X Consortium had deliberately excluded GPLed code from their distributions for many years, because they didn't *want* code that prohibited incorporation into commercial products.) Furthermore, the X Consortium had been making noises about making this change for a couple of years before its dissolution. > I don't know if it's feasible, but does anybody think a class action > can be made of this? No. Kragen -- Kragen Sitaker We are forming cells within a global brain and we are excited that we might start to think collectively. What becomes of us still hangs crucially on how we think individually. -- Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web