Hi, everyone,
Hartmut Schirmer wrote:
there are plans about changing the GRX licence. It´s now under LGPL with an exception for DOS. Several people (me, Csaba, Peter Gerwinski) thought about changing this.
Major concerns were
- Current licence favours DOS against Linux
- GRX can´t come along with the GNU pascal compiler GPC as its default graphics library (Turbo-Pascal compatibility)
- No one currently really care about any copyright violation
Future plans
- Assign GRX to the FSF
- Change the Copyright to GPL
- Add an exception for GCC runtime support: As a special exception, if you link this library with files compiled with a GNU compiler to produce an executable, this does not cause the resulting executable to be covered by the GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any other reasons why the executable file might be covered by the GNU General Public License.
Major benefit: FSF can react on GRX copyright violoations and GRX can be treated as a low level GNU graphics lib.
I send the required papers to the FSF about 2 weeks ago by snail mail (may take some time from europe).
Changing the licence will require the same papers from
- Csaba Biegl (csaba@vuse.vanderbilt.edu)
- Michael Goffioul (goffioul@emic.ucl.ac.be)
- Ulrich Leodolter (ulrich@lab1.psy.univie.ac.at)
and maybe
- Sven Hilscher (Sven@rufus.central.de)
- Michal Stencl stenclpmd@bratislava.telecom.sk
- Thomas Hahn hahn@itpaxp5.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de
- Vincenzo Morello (morellov@tin.it)
- Andrzej Lawa [FidoNet: Andrzej Lawa 2:480/19.77]
- Gary Sands (gsands@stbni.co.uk)
[...]
Is the license change and copyright assignment complete by now?
I am asking because
- I want to know whether I can make GRX with BGI2GCC/BGI2GRX the official graphics library for GPC, and
- I have a version of GRX for MS-Windows 95/98/NT here which I want to release for beta testing under the final license as soon as this story is over.
This leads us to the question where GRX is going. Where is its place when there are portable GUI and 3d libraries like Gtk, Mesa, etc. available?
IMHO, GRX is a good choice when you just need some graphics primitives, for instance
- for teaching,
- for writing programs that run on limited hardware that cannot hold sophisticated graphics servers like X11,
- for porting existing programs that currently run reliably under MS-DOS using low-level graphics to other environments.
With added support for the MS-Windows API, GRX will be - up to my knowledge - the most portable low-level graphics library available and certainly worth to survive. And with the license change it can become an official GNU project that is present in every Linux distribution etc.
Some work is necessary to finish the picture:
- Update the license notices of all files.
- Integrate BGI2GCC/BGI2GRX into the main source tree.
- Integrate the code for MS-Windows into the main source tree.
- See what can be done to make GRX easier to install and even more portable. I am suggesting to create a `configure' script, so compiling GRX becomes as easy as typing first `configure' and then `make'.
- Fix all bugs.
- Write documentation.
Is anybody out there willing to do some work in this direction? I do not have the time to do this myself, but I could help.
This is a big chance to become the leader of an official GNU project! ;-)
Peter