wine-devel February 2002

wine-devel@winehq.org

142 participants
296 discussions

more on wineconf 2002
by Michael Robertson 08 Feb '02

08 Feb '02

I've fielded a few questions from people who are interested in wineconf 2002. http://net2.com/lindows/hotels.htm For a list of hotels. The best on the cheap/close scale would probably probably be Homestead which are really nice suites (have a little kitchen I believe). Sorry about the short notice (by Feb 14th). That's of course not the cutoff to attend, but just the cutoff for those of you to attend that want Lindows.com to pick up the airfare. We don't intend on advertising it to the general public so we keep a high caliber of attendee. The only place the notification has gone is wine-devel list. We currently have about 15 people signed up. Alexandre told me to tell you he's coming if that will help get more people here. Please continue to send in your ideas about topics and speakers. This will help make the conference as informative and rewarding as possible. We'll also have a fun event planned for one of the evenings on Lindows.com so we'll try to make it a good social event as well as technical. -- MR Lindows.com michael(a)lindows.com 858-410-5941 Bring choice to computers: Become a Lindows.com Insider http://www.lindows.com/signup

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Re: Wine license change
by Roger Fujii 08 Feb '02

08 Feb '02

Steve Langasek <vorlon(a)dodds.net> wrote: > Under the LGPL, everyone /will/ contribute back, because that's what the > LGPL requires. If you are using marketing speak for "contribute". GPL requires 1) for you to show your work 2) You effectively license your software to the FSF. It doesn't say it has to be in any useful form to be worked back into the originating project (if any). > Under the LGPL, it's not for them (or for you) to decide > whether they have anything to contribute back; if they make modifications, > they must be shared openly. And you're right that some people don't want > to contribute back. That's precisely WHY we would consider relicensing > under the LGPL. If everyone shared of their own free will, why would we > need a license that said they had to share? The question at hand is > whether or not we want to allow others to benefit from Wine without > sharing their changes. Here we go again.... If this is *all* it did, LGPL is far less objectionable. The problem with *GPL is that it also regulates the UNMODIFIED use of the software. > I make no bones about the fact that I'm a staunch believer in copyleft. > If Free Software has value, then there's also value in keeping it Free. Freedom means allowing people to do things, even things that you don't agree with. BSD = Free. GPL is not. Call a spade a spade.... > > As for commercial interest, I see that Apache+modssl has done quite well > > against any closed-source versions. > I would argue that this is a different ballgame. In the web serving > field, There's More Than One Way To Do It, there shouldn't be... http and ssl are 'well' defined protocols. > and trying to avoid forks leads to infrastructure issues as you need more > and more management to make decisions and guide the project. this is a project SIZE issue and has very little to do with the license. > In Wine, most of the decisions have already been made by Microsoft for us, > it's simply a question of implementation; and most of that implementation > is parallelizable to a high degree. and what gives you this impression about wine? Seems that many of the subsystems are interconnected (look at the recent thread on dll mapping). Can't imagine that DX support wouldn't impact anything else. > Having a license that allows commercial offshoots of a > webserver lets companies come up with innovative new designs that > wouldn't have been incorporated into the main tree. Having a license that > allows commercial offshoots of Wine potentially leads to a bunch of > different Windows emulators, each of which is 98% complete and none of > which works with half the software people want it to. If it works 100% with the 1-3 pieces of software a user needs it for, the user certainly wouldn't care. The question is whether the alternative would be better or not..... > I'm sure that under a BSD-style license, Wine could continue to outcompete > any commercial offshoots. The question is, which license model gives us > the best chance of competing with *Microsoft*, who already has the lead? If this is the goal (it certainly is mine), then *GPL is not a good choice, because it would interfere with deployment (*GPL wouldn't allow being bundled with the playstation2 or other HW platforms as an example). If acceptance is the goal and you care about wine in a non-linux context, stay with BSD/X11. If you don't care about expanding the pie, go *GPL.... -r

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Re: wine license change - look at how ghostscript is licensed
by dschwarz＠bellatlantic.net 08 Feb '02

08 Feb '02

As a non-coder but longtime interested observer of the WINE project, here are my ideas: Consider doing what ghostscript does (http://www.ghostscript.com/). New versions are released under the AFPL license (more restrictive than GPL). Old versions are re-released under GPL when they are about 1 year out of date. This may be applicable to Wine. Like Wine, ghostscript tracks an evolving API. Older versions are useful but may not have all the latest bells and whistles. Those that need to be on the cutting edge have to use the more restrictive license. How this could be applied to Wine: Going forward, all builds are released under LGPL. They are then re-released one year later under an X11 style license. Regards, Daniel Schwarz http://www.winecentric.com/ coming soon... the wine wiki! test it at http://www.winecentric.com/test

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Re: Wine license change
by Andreas Mohr 08 Feb '02

08 Feb '02

Seems Slashdot is fast today ;-) They already have a thread about the proposed license change running. One guy made an interesting suggestion: a "dual license" scheme (like MySQL uses) where you switch to (L)GPL, but certain companies are allowed to take code without contributing everything and their arms and legs back... -- Andreas Mohr Stauferstr. 6, D-71272 Renningen, Germany Tel. +49 7159 800604 http://home.nexgo.de/andi.mohr/

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Re: Wine license change: it's about time!
by Roger Fujii 08 Feb '02

08 Feb '02

Gavriel State <gav(a)transgaming.com> wrote: > Quite the opposite: It is not 'competitive advantage' that concerns us, > or others using our code without contributing their own code. It is > simply that we could not and cannot afford to do our development without > monetary compensation. If the OLE DLLs had been LGPLed, we could not > have been able to afford to do any DCOM work, since we would have had > no prospect of getting paid for it. > > Under the LGPL, the only possible business model is this: > a) Find someone who might need some piece of code > b) Sell them on: "We can do this for you, and release it under > the LGPL for $x dollars. We're really good at what we do, > honest" > c) Do the work, and hope to actually get paid. well, a)+b) is really the same, and you left out d) sell support on the changes, but yes, there are only 3 choices. I really think that *GPL will have problems in the long term because there is no real economic way to sustain it, but it's going to take VAlinux/SUSE/RedHat to finally go down in flames for people to take a long, hard look at the issue. Think the patent model (with a much shorter protection period) is a good place to start. > The LGPL simply slams the door shut on that whole model, saying in effect > "It's my way or the highway". It also slams the door shut to non-development areas too. -r

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Re: wine-devel digest, Vol 1 #714 - 13 msgs
by Roger Fujii 08 Feb '02

08 Feb '02

dschwarz(a)bellatlantic.net wrote: > Consider doing what ghostscript does (http://www.ghostscript.com/). New > versions are released under the AFPL license (more restrictive than GPL). > Old versions are re-released under GPL when they are about 1 year out of > date. This is fine for the "owners" of the project. It gives them a grace period and makes sure that changes gets worked back in. However, if you are on the outside, it blows, since you must IMMEDIATELY make your changes available (because of the GPL). > How this could be applied to Wine: Going forward, all builds are released > under LGPL. They are then re-released one year later under an X11 style > license. This won't work very well since all that this is really requiring is that changes to the changes are LGPLed, but not changes to the base. What might work is this (though this won't be considered "open" by those self-professed 'champions' of open-source. BSD/X11 base with the following LGPLish addition: Modifications to 'derived work' must be made available within 12 (or some reasonable period) months of initial publishing under the same terms. This way, unmodified versions aren't virialized like the GPL, but you will (eventually) have access to any improvements. -r

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RE: Wine license change: it's about time!
by Patrik Stridvall 07 Feb '02

07 Feb '02

> Patrik Stridvall wrote: > > > Bottom line is clear: as the project matures and becomes more > > > useful, the deterant of contributing code back from a business > > > perspective is going to greatly increase, while at the same > > > time, the incentive under the LGPL would have also increased. > > > > This is a just claim without any sort of proof. > > It seems like a reasonable analysis to me; contributing code > represents a bigger and bigger gift as Wine comes closer to > completion, > as your competitors will be able to produce useful products with > less and less work. The only likely head to head competitors that I can see are two companies that uses Wine to port their competing applications. As Wine nears completion, the competive advantage fixing Wine at all instead of working around the difference in their respective application becomes quite low so I don't think we will see that many patches from either. LGPL or no LGPL. > Under the LGPL, this is ok, because you'll have > access to the competitor's code as soon as he starts shipping ig. > Under the X license, you're in trouble, and have to hustle to > reproduce > the work the competitor did. In the longer perspective neither company will live or die because the better quality of the Wine port, but rather because of the better quality of their application. So even the company that is nice to Wine is not likely to suffer serious competive disadvantages anyway. In fact it might even make sense to them to make a deal that they should treat Wine as it was LGPL despite being competitors. But this is their choice and we shouldn't force it on them. > > For head to head competitors > > it has some (but only some) relevance. However this is not > the kind of > > business models we are likely to see IMHO. > > Really? Sun doesn't compete head to head with IBM? I some markets, yes. In the Wine market neither of then competes so your example is largerly irrelevant. Anyway, if both would enter the Wine market I would be very suprised if they really competed head to head. I would rather think they did it in some niche of their own. > > > In economic terms, for Wine, one spells death, the other, life. > > > > Another grandiose claim without any substance. The world is not that > > simple. Both approaches has their pros and cons but neither is life > > not death. > > It captures the essense of how the two licenses set up incentives, > though. In a simplified enconomic theory: Perhaps. In the real world: Difficult to tell, but I believe not. > I think Patrik and I agree that it's important for the Wine license > to provide economic incentives for companies to contribute to the > Wine project. Yes. > His legal analysis of the LGPL differs so sharply > from mine (or that of most people), as far as I can tell, that > just about nobody agrees with his point of view on it. Perhaps it is because I'm bad on explaining what I mean. Anyway, I would rather be alone and right than not alone and wrong. :-)

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RE: Wine license change: it's about time!
by Patrik Stridvall 07 Feb '02

07 Feb '02

> On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Dan Kegel wrote: > > > It's about time. Putting Wine under the xGPL is the best way > > I can think of to ensure its future. The xGPL makes it possible > > for competitors to cooperate for their common good - which > is pretty amazing. > > This is a fundamental point which we haven't had a chance of > discussing > last time as we argued over silly future (unlikely) possible > changes in > copyright law. I think you missunderstood what I was saying I said that I believe that the courts eventually will interpret the CURRENT law as I suggested since it the way that IMHO makes the most logical sense. For the law to perform as you wish will require very complex and possible self countradictory or unconstitutional interpretations. Anyway, there is no reason to restart that discussion. I and Alexandre have in private mail agreed that we disagree and the discussion is ended. Lets for the sake or argument assumes that the LGPL can do what you believe it can. I will try to in this and latter mails explain why this is not a good idea for a project like Wine that is not an ordinary library like the LGPL is designed for. > One important argument was that building a thriving economic > environment > around Wine is essential for its success. > > Everybody agreed on this premise, IIRC. Yes. > The argument followed that BSD license is better for creating such an > environment, and hence better for Wine, since more business will > contribute more code back. Yes. > This, I'm afraid, is entirely false. > > I argue that in fact, the BSD license is a STRONG DETERANT > for businesses > to contribute code back, while the LGPL provides an INCENTIVE. For normal libraries this might have some (but only some) truth in it . However Wine is not a normal library as in vain tried to explain last time. Trying to claim that LGPL is good for Wine because (and only because) it is good for normal libraries is pure nonense. There are fundamental differences among them: In the normal LGPL:ed library world, an application that demands some extra functionallity in some LGPL:ed library can do that by implementing that functionallity is the application itself or possibly if the extra functionallity is extensive in a new library. No need to extend the LGPL:ed library. Here LGPL doesn't hurt at all. The application or for that matter the new library can be of any license. You would be hard pressed to claim derivation even if the new library calls your LGPL:ed library. Claiming derivation for the application is clearly absurd. Another difference: In the normal LGPL library world, the application will need the extra functionallity for the NEXT version. In the Wine world, the application will need the extra functionallity for the CURRENT version since it already work on Windows. > Note that I do not care, for the purpose of this discussion, about > businesses which don't intend to contribute code back. They > are of no help > to Wine, and thus irrelevant (if not a little harmful, for reasons so > eloquently explained by Alexandre). Just because they initialy decide not to contribute back doesn't mean that they won't do it in the future then they for example see the work of keeping a seperate tree. Or like in the case of Transgaming when they feel their income is secure. You can't just dismiss such businesses as irrelevant. Irrelevant now, perhaps. Irrelevant tomorrow, maybe, maybe not. > A BSD license is a STRONG DETERANT for a business to contribute code > back. The reason for this is that they have no guarantee that another > business will not improve a little the code, and thus get a > competitive > advantage. Or that other companies will not use that code on > top of the > code they wrote but not released, and thus again, get that > edge. What competitive advantage? I don't believe that you will see many business model that will make sense in the Wine world will compete head to head with some other business model, including the main tree. They will select a niche and try and live there. Some will succed some will not. However there is no reason to make survivial harder. > This is a > fantastic _deterant_ for releasing code back. In fact, Gav validated > exactly this point when he tried to argue for the BSD license > last time: > > <talking about the DCOM work> > But there are companies out there who will benefit significantly > from commercial use of this code, and who can afford to sponsor a > portion of the development cost. Until such a sponsorship happens, > we cannot apply the WineHQ license to that code. > > In other words, they needed that code. They invested some money do get > it. They are happy with the results. Why not release the > code? They have > what they needed in the first place? The reason is clear -- > it cost them > to get there, they can not aford to bring everybody there for > free. I can > 100% understand that. But if the code was under the LGPL, it would not > matter, because even if they brought everybody there, other companies > could not step ahead of them, since if they did, they themselves could > have used that code. > > In other words, TG could have kept Direct3D proprietary, released > everything else back under LGPL, and they could have _known_ > they still > have the competitive edge in the D3D work! This is why the > LGPL is in fact > an _incentive_ for such colaboration. Read Gavriels reply. Need I say more? > Bottom line is clear: as the project matures and becomes more > useful, the > deterant of contributing code back from a business > perspective is going to > greatly increase, while at the same time, the incentive under the LGPL > would have also increased. This is a just claim without an sort of proof. For head to head competitors it has some (but only some) relevance. However this is not the kind of business models we are likely to see IMHO. > In economic terms, for Wine, one spells death, the other, life. Another grandiose claim without any substance. The world is not that simple. Both approaches has their pros and cons but neither is life not death.

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Re: Favor: I need examples of un or poorly documented APIs
by Fredrik Ohrn 07 Feb '02

07 Feb '02

One little gem I found once is "GetInputDesktop", exported from user32.dll in Windows NT and friends. It belongs to the "Window Station and Desktop Functions" topic in MDSN but isn't mentioned anywhere at all. The function can for example be used to detect if a screen saver is running or if the Login/SAK-screen is active. I don't know if it is used by Microsoft in anything that isn't part of the core OS. Regards, Fredrik Ohrn -- "It is easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of computers by the sense of accomplishment you get from getting them to work at all." - Douglas Adams Fredrik Öhrn Chalmers University of Technology ohrn(a)chl.chalmers.se Sweden

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Re: Wine license change
by David Wheeler 07 Feb '02

07 Feb '02

YES. I think switching changing the Wine license to the LGPL is a VERY good idea. If the license isn't changed, Wine is going to continue to suffer from code forks. The current license encourages companies to take Wine, make a proprietary fix, and keep the result proprietary, which means that no one else gets the benefit and the work is fragmented. This is already happening, as Steve Langasek noted: >One thing to bear in mind is that others already ARE forking the Wine >code... Other companies are forking >with no intention to contribute back (see Lindows.com); still others >(Transgaming) have made reintegration of their work contingent >on turning a[n] profit. As Wine becomes more capable, there will be more companies who do this, taking but never contibuting. I agree with Dan Kegel, who said: >It's about time. Putting Wine under the xGPL is the best way >I can think of to ensure its future. The xGPL makes it possible >for competitors to cooperate for their common good - >which is pretty amazing. As Bob Young said .. >"There's been a fundamental problem of getting industry consortium >to work together... But we don't have a single corporate lawyer >in the room. We haven't signed a single licence among any of us... >With the GPL, we have eliminated the need for trust." In my opinion, the LGPL more accurately reflects how most Wine developers _actually_ work. I think many contibutors expect that anyone who improves Wine itself will give those contributions back to the community, while still allowing proprietary programs to use Wine as a library or infrastructure. The LGPL merely changes this expectation into an enforceable requirement. #include <standard_disclaimer.h> --- David A. Wheeler dwheeler(a)ida.org

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wine-devel February 2002