ATI R300 Mesa, Gallium3D Compared To Catalyst

[Ragas]

And all end-users are by definition leeches whereas developers are contributors? I find it hard to find a point in this kind of arguing unless the point is to try to make people feel guilty.

Noooo you see that wrongly! Because Users contribute back Bugs they find in the Code. In return the bad one would be a Programmer who delivers flawless Code and thus causing the Users to become leeches because they can't find any more bugs.

[Ragas]

Linux has the GPL, and Linux is more popular, QED?

You know, the global temperature has steadily increased while the number of pirates in the world has steadily decreased. That correlation must be a proof of causation! Pirates keep the world cool! It's science!

Hmm... so, since the number of pirates is increasing in Angola it should soon be the coolest place on earth!

[yotambien]

I don't think you'll find many in the Linux community who have some kind of hatred against BSD/MIT/X11 license. There are people who'd rather not contribute to projects under such license, but they don't hate it.

You see that's the difference. It's a fact that there's a lot of hatred against the GPL license, maybe not by you. But it's definitely there in the BSD community.

Even in this forum you will find people constantly taking up every opportunity to look down at the *BSDs and anything that comes with a BSD-like license attached to it. That's a fact as much as yours is. And you know what, the constant Windows/Apple bashing, exaggerations, outright lies, fanboism and retarded comments are tiresome enough; when it comes to doing the same towards another free projects, it's just obnoxious.

And you yourself didn't use the loaded term leech just because.

[yotambien]

I don't know who is 'moonraf', but I suspect you're referring to me. For the kernel side of the graphics stack (i.e. drm) GPL should be fine. I'm quite aware that for users space libraries the situation is a little different and that's why I wrote that I would be in favor of the LGPL license.

Yes, you are moonraf. There's a typo in your nick. Michael should be able to fix it for you.

In any case, I'm not so sure about whether it would be fine to license the drm bits to the GPL. When I say I'm not so sure I mean that I don't know it at all. For what I've heard, the kernel and userland components are tightly integrated, so I wonder whether the GPL restrictions wouldn't matter. Anybody here could shed some light about this?

[V!NCENT]

endusers are not the same ballgame, because endusers run compiled code and do not touch touch the code...

[adamk]

You see that's the difference. It's a fact that there's a lot of hatred against the GPL license, maybe not by you. But it's definitely there in the BSD community.

There's no such fact. There's just your opinion that there's a lot of hatred against the GPL license.

I'm quite sure I could find at least a few people in the linux community that hate the BSD license. That doesn't mean "there's a lot of hatred" against it.

Adam

[monraaf]

Depending on your definition of member, I could be considered a member of the BSD community. I like BSD, I use it, and for my own work I prefer the BSD licence.

I'm not sure about FreeBSD, but OpenBSD uses GCC because there isn't another compiler that will do the job. They have stated that if there was a BSD-licensed compiler that did what they needed then they would drop GCC. It's not a situation they're happy with, but if I recall correctly then the alternative is to drop support for all platforms apart from i386.

monraaf: *cough* OpenSSH *cough*

I don't think you'll find many in the Linux community who have some kind of hatred against BSD/MIT/X11 license. There are people who'd rather not contribute to projects under such license, but they don't hate it.

You see that's the difference. It's a fact that there's a lot of hatred against the GPL license, maybe not by you. But it's definitely there in the BSD community.

[monraaf]

AFAIK the only "anti-GPL" sentiment from the BSD community comes from the fact that if BSD/MIT/X11 code is relicensed to GPL (which is allowed) then enhanced, the resulting changes can not be brought back into BSD without effectively GPL-ifying the entire BSD stack, so the changes end up not being available to the BSD community.

Yeah, and if somebody takes BSD licensed code and turns it proprietary the resulting changes also do not end up being available for the BSD community. But they don't seem to have any problems with that. In fact for the proprietary case it's even one of the key features they advertise with.

If the same work is done while keeping a BSD license on the code (BSD code can be used in a GPL project) then changes can flow both ways.

Well, in the case of the code of the graphics stack it's really flowing one way, despite the liberal license. But besides that and in general as I mentioned before there are also third parties who can turn BSD licensed code proprietary and keep their modifications for themselves. Some people don't have any problems with that. That's their right and their choice. Other people however do not feel anything for that and prefer to release their code and/or contribute to projects with a reciprocal license such as the GPL. That's also their right and their choice, and they should not be hated for that.

Bottom line is that there are people who will not contribute to some projects because of the license of the project. If and how much this affects the Linux graphics stack it's hard to tell, but the fact remains that there aren't any contributions coming in from the BSD camp, despite the liberal license.

[bridgman]

I know there was some animosity a while back when BSD code was code in a public git or cvs repo for some linux driver, stripped of all copyright. But that's certainly deserved :-)

Adam

Yeah, now it's coming back to me. There was a problem with copyright headers that started the whole debate, and everything kinda escalated from there.

[archibald]

Depending on your definition of member, I could be considered a member of the BSD community. I like BSD, I use it, and for my own work I prefer the BSD licence.

I'm not sure about FreeBSD, but OpenBSD uses GCC because there isn't another compiler that will do the job. They have stated that if there was a BSD-licensed compiler that did what they needed then they would drop GCC. It's not a situation they're happy with, but if I recall correctly then the alternative is to drop support for all platforms apart from i386.

monraaf: *cough* OpenSSH *cough*