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The XFree86 license change announced by the XFree86 project has caused a great deal of fuss in the development community. One month later, the new shape of things is beginning to come into focus. Unless something happens in the near future, the XFree86 Project's time as the custodian of the X Window System has come to an end, but X development will continue in a new home.
Ostensibly, the new license was to be applied as of the third XFree86 4.4.0 release candidate, but, according to longtime X developer Keith Packard, project leader David Dawes first checked in code under the license last September and updated the list of XFree86 licenses to include the license without any prior notice. Then the announcement that the new license was to be the "official" license for code copyrighted by the XFree86 Project was made by David Dawes at the end of January. The new license does not affect all code distributed by XFree86, but it touches enough code to create a major backlash among vendors and projects that are using and distributing XFree86.
The new license is a valid open source license, but it is a BSD-style license with an "advertising clause" that many find objectionable. The license is not GPL-compatible, which some say is a sure way to make a project irrelevant. Criticism of the new license is not limited to advocates of the GPL, however. It also seems to offend some ardent supporters of the BSD license, including Theo de Raadt:
Like other projects, we will not be incorporating new code from David Dawes into the XFree86 codebase used in OpenBSD. All such changes have to be skipped, rewritten, or you can contact the XFree86 group and place your own efforts to repair this damage.
This leaves the community at an impasse. With XFree86 sticking to the new license, and a large number of projects rejecting said license, other solutions must be sought. In the short term, many projects and vendors are planning on shipping XFree86 4.3 rather than using 4.4. Frederic Lepied, CTO of MandrakeSoft, says that Mandrake has reverted to XFree86 4.3 for the short term. Joseph Eckert, VP of corporate communications for SUSE, also confirms that SUSE will not be utilizing code licensed under the XFree86 1.1 license.
However, utilizing an older version of XFree86 is not a long-term solution. Daniel Stone, a Debian Developer, is one of many predicting a fork of the project to solve the long-term issues:
More than ever before, XFree86 has backed itself into a hole. The challenge now lies with the community to dig X out of the hole it's now in. Unfortunately, as kdrive and other solutions are not yet mature enough, it is my firm belief that this will only come about through a fork of XFree86. Sad, especially when you consider that that's how XFree86 came about; X.Org relicensed X, XFree86 got upset, and forked. We may be about to watch just a little bit of history repeating.
Keith Packard made it clear at FOSDEM that he believes this fork has already taken place; it was done by David Dawes when he changed the license. So now the "trunk" development effort is moving to freedesktop.org. According to Packard:
X.org and various Linux vendors are busy putting together a copy of the XFree86 sources from before the license change and are planning on making that available for developers to work on in producing X releases in the traditional fashion -- a monolithic release of the entire tree. The goal of this process is to ensure continuity of the window system implementation and allow people to get an X server capable of supporting more recent hardware.
Packard also says that the freedesktop.org folks are working on improvements to the X architecture:
A related project that we're also working on is to take the monolithic X build architecture and splitting it into pieces. Libraries, fonts, servers and applications will be released separately. Periodically, released versions of the individual packages will be collected together and bundled as a unified release. The goal is to promote rapid development of some portions of the system (like video drivers) without requiring a rapid release schedule for the entire project.
As Stone said, we may be watching history repeat itself. Barring a change
of heart on behalf of the XFree86 Project, it seems that projects and
vendors making use of XFree86 will be looking elsewhere. The question is
whether or not vendors will unify behind an X Window System produced by
freedesktop.org, or another group -- or if the fork ends up creating
several splinter projects. With X.org and several of the key developers
behind it, freedesktop.org looks well placed to become the new home of X
development.
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