February 2002 - Wine-devel - list.winehq.org

RE: BSD, Gav, LGPL, Jeremy, and business
by Roger Fujii 16 Feb '02

16 Feb '02

> > while this is one *small* aspect of copyleft, the *GPL extends > > well beyond that. "fair use" does not allow you to redistribute > > work, > > Yes, it does, that it what fair use is: > The right to distribute somebody elses work or > part of work without a license under some > circumstances. you're right. I was just thinking in terms of backups and work as a whole. Good reading: http://www-sul.stanford.edu/cpyright.html > The *GPL extends the circumstances where I can take somebodies work. but isn't this notion rather frightening? > > nor does it force you to give up your copyright (effectively). > > Neither does the LGPL you can still license the code to others > under any license. You just have to give it back under the > LGPL as well. if you have to give out an unlimited, royalty free license to your work, I think it's not unfair to say that you have given up your copyright protection. As the copyright holder, it's true that you can relicense it to suit other licenses, but it's not clear to me that you can clearly make a copyright infringment case if there is an LGPLed copy in the public. -r

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Re: Clarification on my call for license change
by Roger Fujii 16 Feb '02

16 Feb '02

Aric Stewart <aric(a)codeweavers.com> wrote: > The simple of it is.. you, Patrik, would not buy a Wine distribution > form us. Why would you? You are a developer, and a wine developer on top of that. What seems to be the most commercially successful mode on top of opensource is to have an opensource base and have a value-add component - but I have yet to see a successful mode that has no propriatary component. > It is these sorts of people and companies that we want to target. And > financially Patrik's money for his license or even the money form all > the wine developers would be nearly insignificant compared to a 100+ > seat site license. uh, how can you sell a N-seat site license with something that is covered by *GPL (since this would be a violation of the license)? If your model is to sell by seat, I would like you see the reasoning between the difference of a 10 seat license and a 100 seat license with the *GPL. > As a developer who has worked on far too many proprietary Wine trees and > seen all the fights the Jeremy has gone through. I want to be assured that > i can give my code back to the wine community. As I said before, if a copyleft is all that is needed, choose a copyleft that makes SENSE. LGPL may be convienient, but I have seen no rational argument in having the *GPL's brand of copyleft (other than it's widely used). I think the mozilla project would be a good place to look... -r

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RE: BSD, Gav, LGPL, Jeremy, and business
by Patrik Stridvall 16 Feb '02

16 Feb '02

> Patrik Stridvall wrote: > > > No. If anything, it seems to be using licencing rules > > > to negate copyrights. It really wants to make a copyright > > > into "a right to copy it". Even taking what you say, if you > > > extend what is "fair" use, you obviously must be making it > > > less fair somewhere else.... > > > > As I said, very simplified. > > > > What I meant is that the mechanism that forces release of > > the extension of the LGPL (read: copyleft) is similar to the > > case where fair use is extended so I take legally take > > the work instead. > > while this is one *small* aspect of copyleft, the *GPL extends > well beyond that. "fair use" does not allow you to redistribute > work, Yes, it does, that it what fair use is: The right to distribute somebody elses work or part of work without a license under some circumstances. The *GPL extends the circumstances where I can take somebodies work. > nor does it force you to give up your copyright (effectively). Neither does the LGPL you can still license the code to others under any license. You just have to give it back under the LGPL as well. > > The copyleft mechanism forces "push" of the source code > > which is better in the case of software. > > > I by this wanted to illustrate that copyleft is not something > > inherantly "evil" as Brett Glass are apparently crusading against. > > I'll let Brett speak for himself (not like I can stop him :) ), but > I didn't see an argument that 'copyleft' was bad. It was the *GPL is > bad. Just as rms think proprietary programs are evil, Brett > and others > think that the loss of copyright protections are just as bad or worse. Perhaps. But as you said, let Brett speak for himself. > I'm not quite as concerned as Brett, as I think the viral > nature of the > *GPL will eventually be thrown out in US court. Yes, I think that too.

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RE: BSD, Gav, LGPL, Jeremy, and business
by Patrik Stridvall 16 Feb '02

16 Feb '02

> At 02:38 AM 2/16/2002, Patrik Stridvall wrote: > > >I'm sorry if I sound a little angry but it seems that some > >of people have found me guilty by association with you > > Patrik, don't you see? We're both guilty of the same sin: > saying that everything does not revolve around the Earth. > While we have different views of how things DO work, > there's exceedingly strong evidence for what we say. Perhaps. But I think you seem to focus on worst case scenarios, many of them are IMHO unlikely to happend, which impacts negatively on your credebillity. > But because it's contrary to some people's "religious" > beliefs they would rather excommunicate us, suppress > what we have to say, or burn us at the stake than listen. I don't think it is quite that easy. I don't think most of them have an "religious" belief in the LGPL. I think they simple see it as a way to both eat the cake and have it while trivialize the price they have to pay in the order to acceive this. Note, however, that sometimes, but only sometimes, this price is actually worth paying, see below. > >What you are doing IMHO is pure fear mongering, > > No, it's not. I am making predictions based on what > has happened to other businesses in the recent past, > as well as sound economic principles. I'm not advocating > or attempting to induce fear. I do not believe that you try to induce fear, but by focusing on unlikely to happend scenarios you cause fear regarless. > But if the outcome does not > look rosy, it's because WINE really would head down a > very destructive path if it were (L)GPLed. Wine will survive regardless. However I very much fear that it might impact negatively on the willingless of companies to invest in the Wine market and thus reducing the speed which Wine develops with. Note that when Wine fully works (close to 100% of all Windows applications run) it will not matter what license we have, there will be no money in anything except support anyway and the LGPL will not hurt that. It is the way there that worries me. Note that we can always choose LGPL later, but after we have choosen it we can't go back. > >I firmly believe that the GPL and the LGPL has > >a place in the world. > > Their place, and purpose, has been stated by Stallman. > (Not in the licenses themselves, which are designed > to be deceptive, but in Stallman's words in his more > candid moments.) It is to turn publicly available > software into a weapon in his lifelong, personal > vendetta. Again, he has stated this explicitly > himself, and it is also well documented by third parties > such as Levy. Please, now you are fear mongering again. I care not whether I support Stallman or not. I care ONLY about what is good for Wine. > WINE should rise above this agenda and not become an > agent of it. What agenda? The GPL/LGPL works in ways that are almost the dual to fair use. Very simplified: It uses copyright to extend fair use. Fair use have an obvious place in the world. However trying to extend fair use to legalize (or rather rationalize) for example Napster like sharing of music clearly takes things too far. GPL/LGPL have an obvious place in the world. However it has close to the same price as fair use, it discourages investment in new works using classical business models and new business models need to be found. This is obvously not so easy, neither in music business nor in the software business. Possible, yes. Easy, no. Don't try to stretch my analogy to far. The point is this and only this: The GPL/LGPL have a place in the world for almost the same reasons that fair use have a place in the world. However if trying to extend fair use too far is not good, neither is trying it extend GPL/LGPL too far. While fair use is nessesary an author can't live of it. The same with GPL/LGPL.

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RE: Clarification on my call for license change
by Patrik Stridvall 16 Feb '02

16 Feb '02

> Patrik Stridvall wrote: > > > The point is: > > - The 100+ seat company gains. (They get support). > > - Red Hat gains. (They get money). > > - I gain. (I get money). > > - But CodeWeavers, that did a lot of work on Wine, > > doesn't gain anything and they are becaused of the LGPL > > been forced to release all of their work. > > > > Sure they might gain back a few bug fixes if I had to > > do in order to fix a few small flaws, but then Red Hat > > probably would have let me release it anyway. > > A few bug fixes? If it is important enough that such a big > customer pays > Red Hat for developing something then I guess that it is not > only a few > bug fixes we are talking about here. Well, if they just want a support contract the applications they use probably works fine in usual case thanks to the works of others that I have download for free thanks to the LGPL and made a RPM for them. But OK there will probably more that a few bugfixes but somehow I think that most of the time will be spent telling ignorant users the obvious, that is what support usually is. The support money will also pay for me making new RPMs for them from time to time get even more stuff for free thanks to LGPL. Beside a simple support contract are not likely to allow for advanced fixes without extra money being paid. The point is that CodeWeavers will not get any money at all. > And that is to the advantage of > CodeWeaver then because they gain also fucntionallity they might have > needed to develop themself. Yea sure, but don't have too much hopes that it will be that much. Support means support not development. Beside Red Hat would probably have let me release the fixes back even if they didn't have too since the license was still BSD. If their applications works under Wine, there is no reason for me to implement any new functions.

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RE: Clarification on my call for license change
by Patrik Stridvall 16 Feb '02

16 Feb '02

> > of it is not possible. If just somebody in the world realizes > > the flaw he can contact the companies in question and > > point this out to them and for a fee do the work of recompiling > > their application for them. > > You are assuming here, that any given customer will sit and > wait until a > suitable patch is released. That may be true for many and > that's what I > wrote about my earlier job in my previous mail. But if this is an > important feature than he will pay for it because he needs to. If this > is released for others this is no problem because for others > apparently > it may not be that vital otherwise they would have paid for it in the > first place. If you can get the fully cost from the first customer, yes. But often you can't. So you develop it for say 50% of the cost and hope that the rest of your customers will pay the rest. Usually this will work out fine. However with the GPL this is impossible. You almost must have the full cost upfront which means that you have to spend more time negotiating to get the whole cost covered. Worse sometimes you miscalculate how must something costs, but that it not that bad if the code is proprietary. Now when you know the cost you know what to charge the rest of your customers. > Another implicit assumption here is that customers pay for a > given piece > of code. In my opinion they are often not doing that. Instead they pay > for a service. They pay for the service that they have > someone whom they > can contact and who will code if neccessary. That is absolutely correct. However using the GPL would force me to charge everybody that calls the full cost for each improvement. Often the cost will not outweigh the benefit for them so no deal unless I can reduce the price somehow. With the GPL this is impossible. > So even if they use an OS > code that doesn't imply that they never again will pay for any service > based on the assumption that any given functionality they > will need will > turn up sooner or later. Of course not, but some smaller customer might not have so much money so they often hope somebody else will have the same problem and pay for it. > Most larger customers (and I think that's the > one who are intersting for business models) are not willing > to bet their > business on the fancy of some developers. They want to have plans they > can follow so they in turn can tell their customers when and > how a given > problem will be solved. That's why xGPL also works for companies. The problem is not whether it works or not the problem is the drawbacks. As I have said before sometimes this is worth it, sometimes it is not. > I was once arguing with collegues because they maintained that if MS > gave their code for Word to OS then nobody would buy Word anymore and > they couldn't make any money from it. I stil say, and that is > the point > here as well, that this is not true. Private indivudals won't pay > anymore, but usually they are not the money anyway. Really large > companies, with their own development staff might also choose > to develop > and maintain themself, and there may be some loss. But the majority of > smaller companies would still pay for the service of maintainence and > for adding features they need and I bet that even bigger companies who > could afford their own development wouldn't choose to do that. Why > should they? It's more sensible to let somebody develop that who know > about it. The code is there as an insurance should the > developer ever go > down, but not for developing by everybody else. Yes, sometimes this will work out fine, but as I said it comes with a cost and the GPL limits want and how you can offer things to market quite severly. The problem with things like Word processors is that few users use or need new features so the market for enhancements will be quite limited.

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RE: BSD, Gav, LGPL, Jeremy, and business
by Patrik Stridvall 16 Feb '02

16 Feb '02

> Patrik Stridvall <ps(a)leissner.se> wrote: > > > > WINE should rise above this agenda and not become an > > > agent of it. > > What agenda? > > > > The GPL/LGPL works in ways that are almost the dual to fair use. > > Very simplified: It uses copyright to extend fair use. > > No. If anything, it seems to be using licencing rules > to negate copyrights. It really wants to make a copyright > into "a right to copy it". Even taking what you say, if you > extend what is "fair" use, you obviously must be making it > less fair somewhere else.... As I said, very simplified. What I meant is that the mechanism that forces release of the extension of the LGPL (read: copyleft) is similar to the case where fair use is extended so I take legally take the work instead. Of course fair use requires the use of "pull" which my be of less use if the work is compiled into a binary. The copyleft mechanism forces "push" of the source code which is better in the case of software. I observed that there are some theoretical similarites between fair use and copyleft. So seeing copyleft as some sort of contracted or licensed fair use makes sense. This suggest that a too broad fair use have similar problem that a too broad application of copyleft. And indeed both have the freeloader problem for example. I by this wanted to illustrate that copyleft is not something inherantly "evil" as Brett Glass are apparently crusading against. Like the case for fair use a little copyleft is good as long as you don't get to much.

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LGPL, and real World
by Hetz Ben-Hamo 16 Feb '02

16 Feb '02

Gentlemen, I do not wish to interrupt the nice email party going on here, but I wish to bring an example in real life which might let people re-think their decision.... I'll try to be a simple as I can. The following case is totally fiction. For the sake of this email, lets say I'm a lead developer in a company caled qwerty-wine, and one of my customers want me to develop a software for his palm top tun Visio XP on it, for the field engineers. For the sake of this example, lets say I'm checking out wine cvs today. Now - lets say that now is May, Codeweavers had decided to switch to LGPL and lets say that I am their competitor and I just had become aware of a DLL which is not implemented, but it is (according to a co- developer) implemented in Wine under the LGPL tree, so it means I'm 2 "cvs" commands from getting their implementation... Now - what if my product is totally a closed source one and my client doesn't want to reveal a single source code line? then I have 2 choices regarding this DLL: 1. I can Ignore the DLL in the Wine tree and re-implement it from where it was before the license has been changed and I keep the changes since it already implemented in Wine tree (and my customer doesn't want to reveal code). 2. I can "steal" this code from the new LGPL wine tree, and saving myself 90% of headache how to implement it, and invest 10% of the time to change the code cosmetically to look different, so if CodeWeaver's wine DLL looked like: 1+2+3+4=10 Then my code will look like: 5+5=10 So the code is different, but it does same thing, and I still keep my code closed... Who's loosing here? CodeWeavers. I used their code and no one got nothing out of this. Nada. Zilch. Zero. All their investment on that DLL implementation went down, they'll have hard time to re-cap this investment. Lets say that CodeWeavers could drag me to court and I'll be happy to show the code to the Judge or any 3rd party mediator - what he'll see? he'll see completly 2 different implementations which give same results. I win the case and I can collect damages from CodeWeavers. I repeat again - all the above is a FICTION. I'm not a developer (I'm unemployed at the moment) and the whole case - I made it up (although I heard some people were interested to see Wine on Embedded). But you wouldn't know if your competitor will use this trick with your code, will you? TransGaming probably won't do it, but others? So yes, CodeWeaver have their full right to move their code to LGPL or whatever. Is it a smart move for the Wine development move? yes. Is it a smart move business wide? IMHO - no, but CodeWeavers is a private company, and it's Jeremy full right to decide what to do with their code. I support CodeWeavers (bought their crossover even if I used it for 2 days), Transgaming (I subscribed, even if their code doesn't make my games work yet), and Lindows (I'll keep my Redhat and multi user approach, thank you!) and I plan to continue to do so - but will CodeWeaver exists due to this move? for a long term - I'm not sure, although I surely hope to be wrong here.. Just food for thought... Hetz Ben Hamo

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RE: Clarification on my call for license change
by Patrik Stridvall 16 Feb '02

16 Feb '02

> Patrik Stridvall wrote: > > > They turn to their respective distributor say Red Hat and > say that they > > are prepared to pay $XXX per year for a better supported Wine. > > Red Hat in turn hires me (or some other on this list) to do > this and I do: > > > > cvs update ; ./configure ; make install > > > > That is your problem. > > I fail to see why this should be a problem. Once the code is > written is > (basically) free to use by the one who wrote it (or ordered it, > depending on the agreements). Red Hat got his money in that > case because > it agreed to create that code. I was talking about the 100+ seat support contract CodeWeavers wanted. > You got your money because you > were hired > by Red Hat. If Red Hat chooses now to release the code it > still has the > money and you still have your money. The only problem would be if it > didn't release the code and some other customer would come along and > asks for the same thing to be developed. In that case it > might be worse > (but for Red Hat) because it can now get paid a second time, while it > won't get paid if the code is released. But that is a general > problem of > GPLed code and not specifically to Wine. I think that > companies working > with GPL code are well aware of that fact and their busines model must > accomodate that fact. The point is: - The 100+ seat company gains. (They get support). - Red Hat gains. (They get money). - I gain. (I get money). - But CodeWeavers, that did a lot of work on Wine, doesn't gain anything and they are becaused of the LGPL been forced to release all of their work. Sure they might gain back a few bug fixes if I had to do in order to fix a few small flaws, but then Red Hat probably would have let me release it anyway.

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RE: Clarification on my call for license change
by Patrik Stridvall 16 Feb '02

16 Feb '02

> Roland wrote: > > > I just don't understand one thing: > > How does your company expect to make money once WINE is > xGPLed? If all your > > code has to be contributed back, why should I buy it from > your company? > > The same way many companies work also with their properiteary > code. You > know your code needs a feature but you don't have the time for > implementation because you have no customer who says he > really needs it. > Of course many customers may be gald to have it, but none is > willing to > pay for it. The someday a customer turns up who says he needs > that stuff > badly and he wants to know how much you charge for it. Then you > implement that feature, you might have implemented anyway > some day, and > once it is available you can give it to all your customers, or you can > charge a price that others are willing to pay even though > they wouldn't > have paid the develeopment price. I worked for a company that worked > exactly that same way Actually I work for a company that works this way as well for some of our products. > and this works also for GPL code as well. No, it won't. There is nothing save ignorance that would make the other customers pay for it when can have it for free. Granted most customers are ignorant (as far as software development is concerned). But building a viable business model of it is not possible. If just somebody in the world realizes the flaw he can contact the companies in question and point this out to them and for a fee do the work of recompiling their application for them.

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