When trying to understand why the xorg sources on the recent ubuntu distro do not contain the tiny neomagic xserver, it turned out, that somewhere in the source code repository of freedesktop the secret lies. By doing a query:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/log/?qt=grep&q=neo
The following occurrences come up:
Somewhere on 2007-09-02, Eric Anhot removed the backend, due to some licensing issues.The comments are the following:
“Licensing issues of these files include: - They claim to be licensed under the GPL, yet we haven’t allowed that in the xserver repository in the past. - They refer the user to the top of the tree for GPL license text, yet it isn’t there. - They claim to be derived from the (MIT-licensed) ati kdrive code, yet don’t follow the licensing terms of those files.”
So a nice peace of software disappeared. Luckily I could recover from the git history a working version. I wonder if the issue could have not been resolved another way…
It seems that other drivers were removed… So owners of old laptops… you get less and less chance to use them… I think big brother is watching the market and is removing drivers so that you buy those new laptops…
If you would need however the drivers this is the last version that contain them: