Comment 21 for bug 6765

A quick status:

I have contacted Branden Robinson who used to work on this in Debian but still haven't heard from him - he's probably no longer the right person at Debian to contact concerning this problem.

The X.org project has been contacted as to their opinion of the problem and the chances og convincing SGI that they should relicense the code, and this has elicited the following response:

"It's definitely on the list of things that should be remedied at some
point, but I don't know of anyone rewriting the GLX code right now.
We've already managed to get rid of all code under the (rather similar,
IIRC) CID licence, and I think GLX is the only obnoxiously-licensed
piece of code left. Right now, our policy is to only accept MIT/X11 and
non-four-clause-BSD software (or anything with a more liberal license
than that)."
(Daniel Stone, [1])

Regarding a relicensing, Daniel Stone added that the cost for SGI to do so would be "non-trivial":

"Their legal team are going to want to vet every line of both the license
and the code (yes, again). There will be interminable meetings about it
with the legal team and 'all relevant stakeholders', and even these will
have a perceived cost. In the end, it will come down to a lot of money
(some justified, some not), and the legal team and everyone else will
demand a business reason as to why they should spend this money. Also,
they'll want a compelling (to their bottom line, not to a bunch of
bearded people who care about the difference between free software and
open source) reason to change anything at all. " [2]

There was some discussion regarding whom to address in this case since control of OpenGL has passed to the Khronos Group, however there's apparently no doubt that SGO are still the relevant party in this matter:

"SGI still owns and vehemently defends their ownership
and licensing rights of the OpenGL trademark, their code, and their
patents related to OpenGL" [3]

Regarding the priority of this bug within the X.org project, Stone supplied this summary:

"It's definitely on the TODO list, but at the moment we're swamped in
things to fix and actually get working at all (as opposed to working
with a poor license) and have very few developers, so if you could find
someone willing to step up and do this work, things would probably
happen a lot quicker." [4]

CURRENT STATUS:

SGI is unlikely to want to change their license, so if this bug is to be solved, the GLX code in the X.org server (currently 54 source files under the SGI public license and 2 under the GLX public license, i.e. practically everything in the directories GL/glx/ and hw/dmx/glxProxy/) needs to be replaced.

RECOMMENDED COURSE OF ACTION:

A)
Contact SGI at least once more in order to convince them that relicensing this code would be a good idea, for them as well as for all GNU/Linux distributions, since these licenses makes distribution of modified versions of the GLX code legally problematic. Possibly contact the FSF or others to get advice on how to approach them and which legal problems/obstacles may apply.

B)
If this is unsuccessful, estimate the time needed for at rewrite - estimate doesn't need to be very reliable, but are we talking days, weeks, or months? (I should guess weeks, but testing might be a problem - input is welcome). We also need to find if a rewrite e.g. might run afoul of patents.

C)
Find a number of developers and get the job done. I'm willing to participate in the rewrite but will need support from someone with more expertise in graphics programming.

NEXT IN LINE:

Try to work out how best to do A). This will take me a couple of days, at least. Input is welcome, you can send it to my email address or post it as a comment on this bug.

[1]: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2008-May/035111.html

[2]: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2008-May/035172.html

[3]: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2008-May/035180.html

[4]: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2008-May/035174.html