New subject: Clarification on my call for license change

Feb. 15, 2002

      ...
First of all, let me say that my call for a change was not
based on a single mysterious event.  It was triggered
by an event that I cannot discuss due to a confidentiality
agreement.  More important, it is a culmination of a number 
of events and disturbing trends which I can freely discuss.
For the record:
As far as I'm concerned, I do believe you, when you say that.
This however doesn't mean that your conclusion is correct.

In your case there is really two questions:
Is LGPL good for CodeWeavers?
Is LGPL good for Wine?

Just because you might possibly be right as far as CodeWeavers
are concern doesn't nessarily mean that it is good for Wine.
...
We've already discussed the concern with the InstallShield
related patches of Transgaming; I won't belabor
that now.  But doesn't it bother anyone else that
Marcus spent 5 weeks redoing work that they already had?
I think this perfectly illustrates the danger in believing
that not giving back things that are not strategically
important for a specific business model is a viable
thing to do.

That said, I do regret that Marcus had to spend time to 
in concrete terms illustrating that point.
...
Wouldn't you rather be able to better play Monkey Island instead?
Actually no, I don't like Monkey Island. :-)

Seriously, I don't think anybody believe that double work is good,
so the answer is pretty obvious.
...
I have always felt that in order for Wine to progress,
it was important that changes to Wine be returned
to the Wine project.
Yes, so far we agree.
...
It has always been clear to me
that if everyone returns the work, in the long run,
everyone benefits.
I think the flaw in your thinking lies here.
At first glance this seems to be an obviously true statement.

However, if you analyze it more carefully, you will find that
it is not nessarily so that the persons that benefits from
the work are the same people that are able to do the work.

This is not a problem if you have a free market,
then the people that benefits for the work will hire those
people that can do the work if the benefit outweights the
costs.

If futhermore some sort of work protection exist then you
can more efficiently share the cost since you don't have to
worry that somebody steals (read: copies) the work after it
is done and can try to recoup the remaining, costs after you
have done the work. 

In short:
With work protection people able to do the work don't need
to find enough people benefiting from a work to cover all
the costs from start.

The LGPL means that no work protection exists anymore you
have to give the work back and thus people doing the work
must have full costs covered before doing the work.

You can absurdly enough compare it to a world without
copyright protection. The arguments against using the LGPL
for a project is basicly the same as the one for having
copyright protection in the world.

Now you probably think I'm a total nutcase. You will probably say:
"The arguments for copyright protection can clearly not be
the same as the one against LGPL."

No they can't, of course not, but I didn't say that:
Notice the difference of scale "for a project" compared
to "in the world".

This makes your statement below false, since it the dual
of your statement, a IMHO good slogan for people that
believes all information should be free is the following:
"If everybody can use everybody else work,
in the long run, everybody benefits"

You see the similarity don't you?

This is of course not a conclusive argument against the LGPL,
I do not claim it is, but it still makes your statement false.
...
So, with each and every one of my major 
customers over the past three years, I have had a major, knock
down, drag out fight over licensing.  I have always
insisted that changes we make to Wine be returned to
Wine.  This has meant (while in a sales situation) 
explaining the complexities of BSD versus GPL
licenses.
Yes and it makes sense that you do because increasing
the amount of freely available Wine code can only benifit
you, since you can use it in other projects for other
customers.
...
From this doesn't follow that LGPL is a good license from Wine.
It might marginally simplify your life at a terrible price.
Some questions:
Wouldn't abolishing copyright simplify your life?
Probably? Right?

Would you be prepared to pay the price?
Probably not? Right?
...
Wine still requires huge capital investments to
make it work, and any company that is going to
invest hundreds of thousands of dollars is
naturally going to demand ownership of the resulting
work product.  It it were LGPL, it would be
an easy negotiation - I'd just say "Sorry, can't
do it."  End of story.
If copyright didn't exists you could release the code anyway,
but as I said you wouldn't want to pay the price would you?
...
I know that the naysayers will jump on this and say
"Oh, but then you wouldn't have had any customers,
they would have been scared away by the LGPL."
To this I respond very simply:  bullshit.
I was there for each of these sales processes,
and each customer was primarily interested
in the end result, not in the nitty gritty
license details.
The question is not whether LGPL scare away your customers,
the question is whether it scares away other businesses
from investing in Wine.

Obviously specialist consulting services like CodeWeavers
can survive in any market almost regardless of the rules of
the market, as I explain in another mail. This is quite
unintresting as far as LGPL is concerned though.
...
There is an analogy I recall from when I took
a physics and public policy class.  If a physicist
stands up and says "It's a bad idea to build
chemical weapons" nobody will listen to the physicist's
opinion - they just get a different physicist to do the
dirty work. If, instead, she stands up and says "It won't work.  
The inverse poleron field conclusively prevents that."  
There is no more debate, and public policy moves on to protecting
chickens from acid rain or something else.
Obviously, if something is impossible then it is.
...
So, my business is threatened, because CodeWeavers
is trying to be the best physicists in town.
If I, as a matter of principle, refuse
to work on chemical weapons, I lose business because
my customers hire different physicists who will
build chemical weapons.
OK. I can see your point but that comes with as
I said a terrible price.
...
Okay, let me drop the analogy and come back to
straightforward facts.  If I believe in the LGPL,
and release all of my code to WineHQ under the
BSD despite that, then I am a fool.  Transgaming,
Lindows, name your new competitor, each of them
can take the best of my work and use it in their
product.
The world is not a simple place. There are few
things that are 100% wrong or 100% right.

Yes, you can get some "protection" but are you
prepared to pay the price?
...
I'm sure Transgaming doesn't have any problem using any
of the great new Window management code or
Window messaging code we wrote.  In fact, the
InstallShield 6 stuff wouldn't be *possible*
without that code.  However, if I had it to do
over again, I would not have released that code
under the BSD license.
Please note what Dimitrie O. Paun said that the LGPL
only extends to the DLL boundaries. That was one
of the few things everybody seemed to argee on,
even Alexandre last debate.

So even with LGPL, they could still have used it.
the DCOM stuff they did was in another DLL.

I must emphasize this.
This is VERY IMPORTANT that you realize.
...
So, I think there are several fundamental problems:
1.  The current license encourages forks.
We have the WineX fork; I think that Lindows
        is still formulating their strategy, but
        they have publicly stated that they like
        having some proprietary pieces, this certainly
        suggests another fork of Wine.
You can argue that the pain of maintaining
        a separate fork is so great, and the work of
        merging in the BSD code is so hard, that people will
        just naturally contribute their code back.
We do merges of six month drifts on a regular
        basis; it's just not that painful (the last
        one took Francois 2 days; the resulting bug
        fixes probably took 3 or 4 days).
The question is not how hard it is rather why they would want
to waste any resources on it at all. Most companies would
benefit very little from not submitting non strategic code.
...
If this argument held any water, then Transgaming
        would have just been forced to contribute
        the Direct3D and IS6 support back.
The Direct3D stuff is quite seperate and the IS6 stuff are
IIRC in quite seldom changed parts of Wine. 

Your real world example is not very good.
...
2.  The current license discourages competitors
        from releasing their code.
Since I believe in the LGPL, but compete with Transgaming
        and Lindows, contributing my code under the current license
        is like giving my competitors my very best and getting nothing
        in return.
You know, the concept of making money on Free 
software is crazy
        enough without enabling your competitors into the mix.
And, much as Gav and I are friends, we do compete.  I 
have been
in 
        sales situations with embedded customers where gaming 
expertise
        was required.  Now, Gav has the best of what I can do, and I
have
        little or none of what Transgaming did.
In hindsight, if I had it to do over again,
        I would have held out all code we had done
        over the past year or two.  Where would Wine
        and Transgaming be if we had done that?
Hard to tell. But everything comes with a price.
Will you pay it? And even if if you will. Should Wine?
...
3.  The current license is harmful to the growth 
        of Wine, because it creates a murky, uncertain ground.
This is true for a lot of reasons.  First, I think
        we all sort of kind of hope that any corporate
        Wine citizens will follow some sort of unwritten
        ethical code of conduct.  That is, we'd like
        the corporate citizens to pitch in and help Wine
        to grow.
Having unwritten rules is foolish, IMO.
The current license specifies:  go ahead and do
        anything you want - we don't care.  But I think
        we do care (*I* care).  So corporate citizens
        spend all their time worrying about this
        middle ground of perception (how much time
        do you think this debate is taking away from
        my people, and the Wine hacking they could do?)
Well, a Copyleft license provides potential
        corporate citiziens with written rules.
Second, it clarifies the code issues.  Right now,
        say I wanted to work on a game.  Well, gosh, just
        how should I do that?  Should I work against the WineX
        tree?  But if I do that, I can't really talk about
        it on wine-devel, and I can't really share my work
        with others.  Ah heck, maybe Transgaming will fix
        my game.  I'm just going to reboot over to Windows.
And if you don't think that's a serious problem,
        just look at the Wine project historically.  Over
        the past five years, game related patches have
        overwhelmingly dominated wine-devel.  Over the
        past 12-18 months of Transgaming?  Virtually dead.
Add to that the new problem of CodeWeavers now
        being unwilling to contribute their code under
        the current license.
In my opinion, all the developers will just throw
        up their hands and go work on something else, and
        I think that would be a great tragedy.
Well we will see, however we should think both once or twice
before going down the one way street that LGPL is.
...
I hope that helps.
Looking back on this, I see nothing but kindling.
If you want to raise a point or an argument that is a variation on
something we've heard before, just don't.
And if you're not a contributor to Wine, please don't
respond at all.  You can flame me privately.  Or go find a different
mailing list.
I would really prefer to hear only what Wine contributors
think about this.
Well, I really hope I qualify.
Read what I have written and think about it.
...
p.s.  For the record, in my mind, Dan Kegel qualifies as a major
contributor to Wine.  It is through his hard work that we 
have a chance
that the U.S. court system will put into place systems that will make
Wine development easier and protect Wine from predatory action
from Microsoft.
I guess that was I stab at me. 

As explaination I was irritated on all non-contributors that posted
their crap, so I just happend to take it out on somebody whose name
I didn't recognize, so I'm sorry that Dan Kegel happend to get in
the way.

RE: Clarification on my call for license change

Patrik Stridvall

Roland

tags

participants (2)