RE: BSD, Gav, LGPL, Jeremy, and business
First, and formost, we have now heard the oppinion of two big (from Wine POV) commercial players: Gav and Jeremy. Now, it was painfully obvious to me that Jeremy had the power of reason on his side, while Gav only a strong emotional impulse.
Since choosing the LGPL is a one way street, it is hard to not be emotional, when arguing against it. It is much easier for the LGPL propenents to be emotionally detached. If you lose now, ou can come back next month, next year or whenever and try again. The LGPL oppents can't for obvious reasons.
And there's reason for that -- the LGPL make a lot more sense for Wine.
Still think that after reading my reply to Jeremy?
We've heard countless arguments why that's not that case. A lot of them where simply nonsense. The few that made some sense, were ALL based on a false premise: that Wine is a monolithic product.
I have never believed that Wine is a monolithics product.
Now, this is a _fundamental_ point that is ignored over and over again: Wine is a _collection_ of products, just like a Linux distribution. Which means that the viral aspect of the LGPL _stops_ at every DLL boundary.
Very true and this significantly weakens any "protection" that the LGPL offers.
It is easy to see now that this does not preclude most commercial implementations. In fact, it encourages them givin them a level playing field. Just like Linux does.
Perhaps, but at a terrible price. Read my reply to Jeremy.
People, for crying out loud, _think_ about it, and the conclusion will jump right out at you. THIS IS WHAT WE WANT: -- if a company invests a _little_ to improve a DLL, we should have no moral problem requireing them to contribute that back. Since it's just a little contribution, no business will be destroyed because of it. -- if a company makes a huge improvement (like Transgaming), they can simply drop the original Wine code, and keep everything propriatary. Now, compared to the _huge_ improvement, the cost of reimplementing the mostly non-working Wine code should be trivial.
Bottom line is: -- are we raising the bar for comercial companies with a LGPL licence? YES! -- how _much_ are we raising it? BY A TRIVIALLY SMALL AMOUNT! -- do we invalidate TG business model? NO!
Somehow you seem to believe that all reasonable business models will strictly following DLL boundaries, but you have given. absolutely no proof of this, you just assume it. Face it the design of the Windows API are a terrible mess that doesn't follow DLL boundaries.
At 01:29 PM 2/15/2002, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
Somehow you seem to believe that all reasonable business models will strictly following DLL boundaries, but you have given. absolutely no proof of this, you just assume it.
Face it the design of the Windows API are a terrible mess that doesn't follow DLL boundaries.
Patrik: Very true. In fact, Microsoft has intentionally scattered functions among DLLs in an illogical fashion so it can make the deceptive argument, in court, that add-ons like Internet Explorer are inseparable from Windows. They want to be able to say, "See, Your Honor? I removed this MSIE DLL from Windows, and now the system won't boot! That's proof that the two are one product." --Brett
On Fri, 15 Feb 2002, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
Still think that after reading my reply to Jeremy?
Yes, I do. Listen Patrik, in the past you seemed to be a reasonable person. Now you are indistingushible from a troll. Really. It seems that whatever is argued, you have a psychotic tendency to invent a counter-argument, no matter how silly it is. Now, that fun sometimes, but it has gone too long, too often in this bitter thread. For this very reason I have avoided to argue with you, but I will make this one exception, since the thread has progressed past useful long time ago.
Very true and this significantly weakens any "protection" that the LGPL offers.
Which is a feature, and which should silence all reasonable BSD supporters. The ones that are left, simply ignore this very important FACT (It's emphesised since I don't want to argue it, let's assume it for the purpose of this discussion).
Perhaps, but at a terrible price. Read my reply to Jeremy.
Crap. What terrible price, WTF are you guys smoking, 'cause I want some of it! Once again: Wine is isomorphous to a Linux distribution. They are growing MUCH faster than Wine ever did. They have a lot of commercial backers. Stop this stupid, idiotic, "LGPL will kill all business" argument.
Somehow you seem to believe that all reasonable business models will strictly following DLL boundaries, but you have given. absolutely no proof of this, you just assume it.
Patrick, you are incorrigible. Yes, our purpose in choosing a license is not to support as many business models as possible. No. It is to find a licence that _overall_ is best for Wine. Now, we all agree that some commercial involvment is good. The question is, how much? All possible one? Like everything is life, the answer must lie in the middle, not at axtreme. So we must sacrifice a few business models to benefit Wine. It's just fare. An LGPL licence will keep most of them still viable (such as TransGaming, for example). WTF is your problem with it? -- Dimi.
At 02:13 PM 2/15/2002, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
Listen Patrik, in the past you seemed to be a reasonable person. Now you are indistingushible from a troll.
Hmmm. Since when does "troll" == "anyone who disagrees with a lemming-like rush to the (L)GPL?" --Brett
On Fri, 15 Feb 2002 14:21, Brett Glass wrote:
At 02:13 PM 2/15/2002, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
Listen Patrik, in the past you seemed to be a reasonable person. Now you are indistingushible from a troll.
Hmmm. Since when does "troll" == "anyone who disagrees with a lemming-like rush to the (L)GPL?"
Although I would not have put it like that, I was also wondering when disagreement turned into trolling. Dimitrie O. Paun <dimi(a)cs.toronto.edu> wrote:
Crap. What terrible price, WTF are you guys smoking, 'cause I want some of it! Once again: Wine is isomorphous to a Linux distribution. They are growing MUCH faster than Wine ever did. They have a lot of commercial backers. Stop this stupid, idiotic, "LGPL will kill all business" argument.
Please people. Try to keep it civilized without all of the name calling. Sean -------------- scf(a)farley.org
On Fri, 15 Feb 2002, Sean Farley wrote:
Although I would not have put it like that, I was also wondering when disagreement turned into trolling.
Since disagreement is expressed in a troll-like way, obviously! :)
Please people. Try to keep it civilized without all of the name calling.
Sorry, the discussion stoped being civilized some time ago... :) Really, wasting people's time with silly arguments is rather revolting. It gets worse: it distracts the entire community from meaningful discussion on such an important topic. -- Dimi.
At 03:22 PM 2/15/2002, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
Sorry, the discussion stoped being civilized some time ago... :)
I've always done my best to be polite and civil throughout this discussion, while at the same time presenting the many strong arguments for my point of view. I've done a great deal of research on the effects of licensing. If I sometimes seem to be a lone voice (or nearly so) in the wilderness, it may be because I tend to catch trends earlier than most people. For example, I was warning people about Microsoft's monopolistic and anti-competitive tactics in the late 1980s, at which time many developers on BBSes and on CompuServe wanted to shout me down and ignore the problem. The xGPL is simply the new threat on the horizon. I'm sorry if not all of the responses to my messages have been civil. I have no control over what other people write. --Brett Glass
My only issue is that both you and Patrik have made your views more than known, and it's obvious you hate the GPL and GPL-style licenses with a vengance.. for whatever reason (which, as someone who has worked on commercial projects involving the GPL, are not - in my experiance and opinion - based in any substanciated fact whatsoever).. So now you've made your point, constantly, how about we just take it for granted that for every email sent to the list saying 'the gpl is good because...' you and Patrik will reply with 'No! It's evil, RMS is satan, viral licensing, noone will use it, blah blah blah'.... The amount of traffic going in to my mailbox will half then :) - Ender On Fri, 15 Feb 2002, Brett Glass wrote:
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 15:30:59 -0700 From: Brett Glass <brett(a)lariat.org> To: Dimitrie O. Paun <dimi(a)cs.toronto.edu>, Sean Farley <sean(a)farley.org> Cc: Wine Development <wine-devel(a)winehq.com> Subject: RE: BSD, Gav, LGPL, Jeremy, and business
At 03:22 PM 2/15/2002, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
Sorry, the discussion stoped being civilized some time ago... :)
I've always done my best to be polite and civil throughout this discussion, while at the same time presenting the many strong arguments for my point of view. I've done a great deal of research on the effects of licensing. If I sometimes seem to be a lone voice (or nearly so) in the wilderness, it may be because I tend to catch trends earlier than most people. For example, I was warning people about Microsoft's monopolistic and anti-competitive tactics in the late 1980s, at which time many developers on BBSes and on CompuServe wanted to shout me down and ignore the problem. The xGPL is simply the new threat on the horizon.
I'm sorry if not all of the responses to my messages have been civil. I have no control over what other people write.
--Brett Glass
At 08:45 PM 2/15/2002, winedev(a)admdev.com wrote:
My only issue is that both you and Patrik have made your views more than known, and it's obvious you hate the GPL and GPL-style licenses with a vengance..
By only the second sentence of your message, you've begun to argue ad hominem. You appear to be attempting to incite others to dismiss my arguments (which cite fundamental economic and business principles), and/or to suppress views you do not like, by claiming that they're based on emotion rather than logic. In short, you're doing what's often called "flaming." Please don't. Especially if, as you say, you are really concerned with the quality of discourse on the list. --Brett
My only issue is that both you and Patrik have made your views more than known, and it's obvious you hate the GPL and GPL-style licenses with a vengance..
[snick]
In short, you're doing what's often called "flaming."
I apologise, and assure you that wasn't my intention... I'd hoped it was obvious that the tone of the mail was intended to be dry sarcasm. My point was that it does seem a little redundant to repeat the same arguments over and over in response to the same arguments being posted... I understand you prefer the BSD license, and I've read some of your comments on BSD advocacy lists promoting both the license and OS. Maybe hate was the wrong word, 'disagree' with. I don't know why you saw my message as a flame, it's simply stating a fact... If I'm wrong, and there is some points you agree with in the xGPL licenses, feel free to say so! :) Oh, yes, and Patrik - apologies to you too - I didn't mean any offence, true you are more receptive to an opposing opinion/argument. - Ender
At 04:42 AM 2/16/2002, winedev(a)admdev.com wrote:
My point was that it does seem a little redundant to repeat the same arguments over and over in response to the same arguments being posted...
I am trying to repeat myself as little as possible and only to post when there is new information to mention. However, it seems as if a certain number of people will always ignore one's previous postings and then assert that you're hand-waving if you don't repeat earlier arguments.
Maybe hate was the wrong word, 'disagree' with. I don't know why you saw my message as a flame, it's simply stating a fact... If I'm wrong, and there is some points you agree with in the xGPL licenses, feel free to say so! :)
Well, it's hard to talk about "agreeing with" or "disagreeing with" a license, since it is not a statement but rather a contract. I certainly do disagree with Stallman's "philosophy" and goals, as you know. I also believe that the FSF's licenses are unconscionable and hopefully legally unenforceable. It did quite surprise me when Jeremy claimed that the X11/BSD license was "murky," when the BSD license has been tested in court. The FSF licenses never have, there's much more controversy over what they mean, and they seem to be on quite weak ground legally (as I've explained earlier). --Brett
At 04:13 PM 2/15/02 -0500, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
just fare. An LGPL licence will keep most of them still viable (such as TransGaming, for example). WTF is your problem with it?
-- Dimi.
AFAIK, Transgaming will have big problems with LGPL. It is Codeweavers that will still be viable. Roland
On Mon, 18 Feb 2002, Roland wrote:
AFAIK, Transgaming will have big problems with LGPL. It is Codeweavers that will still be viable.
And why is that? In fact, Gav failed to even hint at why a LGPLed Wine would invalidate TG's current business model. -- Dimi.
"Dimitrie O. Paun" wrote:
AFAIK, Transgaming will have big problems with LGPL. It is Codeweavers that will still be viable.
And why is that? In fact, Gav failed to even hint at why a LGPLed Wine would invalidate TG's current business model.
I had thought that I articulated our issues with the LGPL in my previous postings, but I'm happy to reiterate my concerns. Keep in mind that there is a distinction between our current business model, and the business we may do in the future. There are several things we're doing that we haven't talked about publicly yet. My LGPL concerns are: 1) We support copy protected CDs in our WineX binary releases. This support required changes at a fairly low level: the cdrom code, exception handling code, and the wineserver. We cannot release this code (at least as it stands now) due to concerns over the DCMA, etc. If the WineHQ core went LGPL, we would not be able to apply our copy-protection patches and release a binary-only package. More generally, this problem applies to anyone who wants to combine Wine code with any custom systems or interfaces that might be protected by NDA or other such legal restriction. 2) While much of our DirectX work is confined to the core DirectX DLLs, some of it also occurs in places like the X11drv - much of the code to deal with specific hardware extensions (like NVidia's Vertex Array Range capabilities) is there. Additionally, we still don't have complete DLL seperation, so it is not at all clear that all our work could be neatly isolated into non-LGPLed DLLs. 3) If the codebase had been LGPLed earlier we would not have been able to start TransGaming in the first place, since we would not be able to attract any end users to the street-performer-protocol model. The incentive of helping us afford to make the code free is a very powerful one, and is central to our busines. Why should end users contribute to us if we would just have to give the code away anyway? Furthermore, if we had had to LGPL our initial code, there would be nothing stopping large gaming companies from making use of our work without contributing to it's creation. As I've said before, having another company's code is *not* good enough reward for us: we need cash in order to pay people. Our developers can't eat electrons. 3) The LGPL would have prevented us from doing any of the work on DCOM. If we had known that we would have no way to recoup our costs, we could not have afforded to do the work. With the LGPL, the only way that we could have recouped costs would have been to pre-sell the code before it worked. IE: Only the consulting-shop model would be allowed. 4) Most importantly, the LGPL is a one way road. Once we start down that path, it will be next to impossible to go back. If the LGPL would have prevented any of the work that TransGaming has contributed up until now, who knows what other companies or models it will prevent from forming in the future? Additionally, I would like to remind people of the contributions that TransGaming has made to the project so far: o Since TransGaming was started, we have contributed close to 2Mb worth of patches to the public tree; that's around 5% of all patches to Wine in that period. Not bad, considering our size, I think. o We contributed a full restructuring of the DirectDraw code, nicely seperating it into the user and driver side, and making possible new innovations like the SDL driver that we posted earlier. We added implementations for newer 2D APIs that were previously unsupported. o We contributed a significant rewrite of the DirectSound code, adding in HEL support, amongst other things. o We contributed a great deal of code to speed up DIBSections and related 2D functions. We had been considering doing a product very similar to CodeWeavers' QuickTime crossover work, and tuned a fair bit of code to work better with QuickTime. CodeWeavers seems happy enough selling that code now. o As part our DCOM work, we did extensive bugfixing in the code for Typelibs, safearray, RPC, etc. That code was contributed back, and is used in other's commercial products. If the main tree goes LGPL, or if there is a significant LGPLed fork, we are going to need to seriously rethink how (or if) we make any further contributions. That said, I believe that my WineCorp suggestions address both my concerns as well as the issues raised by the LGPL camp. The WineCorp model would effectively be like the LGPL, but with additional options for different commercial opportunities. Most importantly, it would have the flexibility to address any future business models that have not yet been considered. -Gav -- Gavriel State, CEO TransGaming Technologies Inc. http://www.transgaming.com gav(a)transgaming.com
On Mon, 18 Feb 2002, Gavriel State wrote:
Keep in mind that there is a distinction between our current business model, and the business we may do in the future.
BUt this is not a reasonable discussion assumption. Let's concentrate on one issue at a time. I understand you are trying to secure an escape route, but let's try to contain the debate.
There are several things we're doing that we haven't talked about publicly yet.
... and thus I can not be aware of.
My LGPL concerns are:
1) We support copy protected CDs in our WineX binary releases. This support
This is a valid issue, and I am sure that the Wine community would more than happy to provide hooks for you for exactly this purpose. There's no other option in this case, so I don't think it' even an issue.
2) While much of our DirectX work is confined to the core DirectX DLLs, some of it also occurs in places like the X11drv - much of the code to deal with specific hardware extensions (like NVidia's Vertex Array Range capabilities) is there.
Most likely the x11drv code so that useful wihtout your DirectX work, so you could contribute it back.
Additionally, we still don't have complete DLL seperation, so it is not at all clear that all our work could be neatly isolated into non-LGPLed DLLs.
We are very close to full DLL separation. And due to the BSD-style licence that the current Wine has, the LGPL will not start to monifest itself for some time. Until than, we should have it. Besides, it's an incentive to finish it up faster, so that should please Alexandre. :)
3) If the codebase had been LGPLed earlier we would not have been able to start TransGaming in the first place, since we would not be able to attract any end users to the street-performer-protocol model.
Sorry, but I don't see that. Your main asset is the DirectX work, and you could have kept it proprietary, and the street-performer-protocol model would have worked just as well. I don't see the problem.
3) The LGPL would have prevented us from doing any of the work on DCOM. If we had known that we would have no way to recoup our costs, we could not have afforded to do the work.
I don't believe it's a valid concern, because: 1. it's not your business model. In fact, it's not a viable business model period; 2. from the Wine POW, we shouldn't care, as I don't see that code comming back to Wine.
4) Most importantly, the LGPL is a one way road.
But that's one of it's features, you know... :) It's what gives people piece of mind, and what I feel creates the level playing field. Just PD, and BSD are manyway roads. That is, this is not a valid point. If you want to argue that, we're stuck with BSD, period.
Additionally, I would like to remind people of the contributions that TransGaming has made to the project so far:
Hey, I'm not trying to hurt TG. I think you guys did good work. But in choosing a license we have to balance many rights: those of the users, of the developers, of the companies involved, and last but certainly not the least, of Wine itself.
That said, I believe that my WineCorp suggestions address both my concerns as well as the issues raised by the LGPL camp.
I personally despise the idea, On practical, and phylosophical grounds. And if we go that route, I don't think I'll follow. -- Dimi.
At 01:49 PM 2/18/02 -0500, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
And why is that? In fact, Gav failed to even hint at why a LGPLed Wine would invalidate TG's current business model.
AFAIK TG sells their own version of WINE. Once WINE is GPL'd, they will have to give all their code back. So why should anyone buy their WINE if they can get all the code for free? Roland
On Mon, 18 Feb 2002, Roland wrote:
AFAIK TG sells their own version of WINE. Once WINE is GPL'd, they will have to give all their code back. So why should anyone buy their WINE if they can get all the code for free?
Your conclusion is wrong, since your assumtion is incorrect. Namely, "Once WINE is GPL'd, they will have to give all their code back." is false, since they can keep their DirectX implementation propietary. This is their primary business model AFAIU, and it does not get invalidated by LGPL. Yes, it's going to be a bit more work, but within reason (and most likely trivial to the amount of work they do on their proprietary components. -- Dimi.
Roland wrote:
AFAIK TG sells their own version of WINE. Once WINE is GPL'd, they will have to give all their code back. So why should anyone buy their WINE if they can get all the code for free?
To answer this question you should first ak WHO is buying it and WHY. Are most people buying it because TG has extensions that are no in the OS Wine tree?
AFAIK TG sells their own version of WINE. Once WINE is GPL'd, they will have to give all their code back. So why should anyone buy their WINE if they can get all the code for free?
Says who? Doing cvs co wine today still gives me the old license wine, so I can use it, extend it and without giving a single line back - not now and not in the future.. Of course - if I will do cvs co wine once the license will be changed - then I'll have to give back the modifications (some of them - at least according to the LGPL license)... There is a difference, my friend... Of course - TransGaming and CodeWeavers could co-operate internally by swapping code that CodeWeaver's or Transgaming is developing since each of them can re-license their code to whatever they want to license it under... Hetz
participants (9)
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Brett Glass -
Dimitrie O. Paun -
Gavriel State -
Gerhard W. Gruber -
Hetz Ben Hamo -
Patrik Stridvall -
Roland -
Sean Farley -
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