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Re: Dr. Seuss, licensing, and WINE
by David Elliott 09 Feb '02

09 Feb '02

On 2002.02.09 05:32 Plato wrote: > On Sat, Feb 09, 2002 at 03:50:09AM -0500, David Elliott wrote: > > On 2002.02.08 15:03 Brett Glass wrote: > > [...] > > >taxes: It will act in its own interest, not yours. The FSF's > > >sole goal is to destroy commercial software developers, and > [...] > > Give me a break dude. Yes, the FSF wants all software to be free and > > wants to rid the world of commercial software altogether. > [...] > > I think it is worth pointing out the the Free Software Foundation does > *not* > want to rid the world of commercial software. > > Stallman has, however, stated that he would like to rid the world of > *proprietary* software. > Whoops, sorry, you are correct about that. However to the person I was replying to commercial==proprietary. Red Hat Linux is a commercial product, but not proprietary (to give an example). Though I think Red Hat does have a few proprietary products they work on. > There is an incredibly important difference. Please do not use the terms > interchangably. See > > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Commercial > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/software-libre-commercial-viability.html > Been there long ago.. just kinda forgot. -Dave

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RE: Wine, enthusiasts, businesses and the agony of the license
by vinn 09 Feb '02

09 Feb '02

IANAL, yada, yada [nor can my involvement with Wine be considered anything more than minor] Patrik wrote: > Companies in this group have several choices: > 1. Don't use new improvement in the main Wine tree, only resync > then a new major version of the application should be released. > 2. Maintain a tree by themselves, continually resyncing in order > to make even minor version take advantage of new improvements > in the new Wine tree. I just want to throw a couple of ideas out about using an LGPL license. There's a lot of people with a heck of lot more at stake than me, and ultimately they deserve to have their opinions weighed more heavily than mine. Ultimately these ideas stem from the practice of licensing software rather than the theory (which is where this thread was headed). First, the LGPL doesn't really ever give a time frame for modifications to be released back. We can safely assume that it means "in a timely manner", since in practice this is how it works. I think we could collectively agree that a company such as Transgaming could be allowed a grace period in order to submit their modifications back. Whether this is a week or a year can be debated. If for no other reason than to ensure clean code. Now you may argue that a year is too long, but keep in mind that the modifications do have to be released, and if it takes them a year the amount of work required for a resync may impact other operations. Second, the LGPL doesn't state how the modifications have to be released. In practice this is done electronically via patch files or access to a modified tree. But there's no reason why the modifications couldn't be released on handwritten post-it notes available by request only. In this manner there is a non-trivial amount of work required to integrate the changes. ------ Brian Vincent vinn(a)theshell.com

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something to do
by Jason Phillips 09 Feb '02

09 Feb '02

Hello everyone, I'm interested in doing some work on the wine project. There's quite a few bugs in the bug list are any in particular that someone would recommend as a good place to start? I might need to document for my own good also. Any guidelines on what/how that should be so it can be contributed? Jason Phillips

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RE: Wine, enthusiasts, businesses and the agony of the license
by Patrik Stridvall 09 Feb '02

09 Feb '02

> On Sat, Feb 09, 2002 at 11:40:54AM +0100, Fredrik Ohrn wrote: > > Another observation is that companies in group 1 are in > direct competition > > with each other, so they want closed source. If TransGaming > released their > > DirectX work BSD style, Lindows would quickly be there to > appropriate it. > > You miss one case here: Companies in group 1 that also want > to make money > with group 2s business model. They could do that easily and > it would give > them a distinct competitive advantage over the group 2 only > type enterprises. > Result: The group 2 only companies *can't* release their > sources any more > if they want to stay in business. I'm not sure that I follow you. Groups 2 companies (like Corel) have one or more Windows application that are likely to be their primary source of income. How can group 1 (like CodeWeavers and Transgaming) companies compete with that? Sure they can compete other group 1 companies to get contract with the group 2 company. If the application was DirectX based I can imagine that Transgaming are likely to give a better bid. But I don't see how they compete with the group 2 company. And in the example above I'm sure that Gavriel according to his promises will release any non-DirectX related stuff he had to do in order to fulfill the contract and if group 2 company is nice perhaps they might even require him to release some of the DirectX related code.

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RE: Dr. Seuss, licensing, and WINE
by Patrik Stridvall 09 Feb '02

09 Feb '02

> If people don't understand that some people are decent and > contribute back > regardless of whether they are forced to or not, but others > are not and > require a feedback loop to force this behavior, then they > don't understand > how the world works and we're just wasting time. That is not one of the problem, as far as I'm concerned I fully agree that there will be companies that will be, how should I put it, less honourable. There ALWAYS are in ALL markets. As I sidenote I would like to say that I believe that the LGPL for reasons stated in last debate will not be enough to stop less honourable companies from doing less honourable thing. You might believe me or you might not, as all people arguing against me last time. Be that as it may, that discussing is dead and I will in the future concentrate on "If the LGPL means what you say it does, we don't want the LGPL". > I think it's more of an issue of people thinking too much in > black/white > terms and people that lean strong towards one side or the other. Yes. Perhaps they are not nessarily thinking in black and white but their arguments are often presented that way. I'm not entirely blameless on that point either, I will try to do better in the future. > Look no further than the US political system for a good > example. You have > the Republicans and the Democrats. Generally they take every > issue to > opposite ends of the extreme such that 99% of congress is at > one extreme > or the other, but 99% of the population wants neither extreme. Exactly, but that is because: 1. They want votes so they can do that they feel is right. 2. The ignorant masses are not likely to understand subtle differences in opionion. When the voters give any of them support, the problem is that they didn't really support the extreme views they presented, but they are forced to do it anyway in order of not being accussed of betraying the will of the voter. In the cases of Wine. I hope that the people working with the Wine project are not among the ignorant masses and thus really are able to understand the subtle differences between different positions. > Essentially we could go on forver about X11/BSD vs. GPL. It's been > discussed to death already folks. What we need are reasonable > compromises. Of course you need to have people willing to > compromise to > do that. I suspect most developers are with the exception of > the view > vocal BSD people and the few vocal LGPL all the way people. > I myself am > certainly not at either extreme. Even if perhaps some people won't believe me. I not really an extremist. I try to take a pragmatic view of the world. I believe that GPL has its place, LGPL has it place and the BSD license has its place. However my analysis of the issues at hand makes me believe that LGPL would be really bad in the particular case of Wine, for reasons that I have tried to explain. I suggest that people try to think about scenarios of circumstances where possible extensions to Wine might be made. This might be business models like Transgaming or Lindows.com or just something Joe Hacker or Joe Ex-Windows-Shareware-Writer or Joe I'm-Conspiring -With-A-Proprietary-Library-Company-But-You-Can't-Prove-It are doing. Just like the examples in the my last mail. Then ask the questions: 1. Do you consider his or her behavior morally or ethically defendable? 2. Does it violate the letter of the LGPL? 3. Does it violate the spirit of the LGPL? 4. Does it violate the letter of copyright law? 5. Does it violate the spirit of copyright law? 6. Do you think any reasonable Judge/Jury would find him or her guilty? With the spirit of copyright law I roughly mean: Is it what congress intended and/or is it constitutional? Notice the and/or: It is possible for act of congress to be constitutional without being the intention of the congress.

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Re: Dr. Seuss, licensing, and WINE
by Roger Fujii 09 Feb '02

09 Feb '02

Steve Langasek <vorlon(a)dodds.net> wrote: > Jeremy White, the man who posted the request for feedback that spawned > this discussion, the developer who is encouraging the Wine community to > adopt the LGPL, works for a company whose principal software product > (though not their only source of revenue) is a bundled package of a piece > of proprietary glue code and Wine functionality. > > Let me repeat. The person recommending the LGPL to us sells a proprietary > program built on top of Wine as part of the business model for his > company. if you are going to follow this line of reasoning, you have to ask jeremy whether or not the crossover plugin would have been written IN THE FIRST PLACE if wine was LGPLed at the time. I really think that LGPL would have at least *some* impact on the decision, which is why there is opposition - it impacts future contributers. > Now, do the people arguing that the LGPL would destroy all chance for > people to make a profit believe that Jeremy is stupid, or out to get you? I'll agree that the Brett overstated the case by saying "impossible". But it does make it very difficult and the thrust of the argument is sound. Even though I'm not too sure if codeweaver's business model is too sound (no flames please), but the request for LGPL makes sense because an LGPLed wine now would deny future competitors (even if they contribute) the advantage that they had. -r

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Wine License change: Open question to Jeremy White
by Roland 08 Feb '02

08 Feb '02

Quote from Jeremy White: "However, with some recent events I cannot disclose, it is clear to me that the opportunity for Wine to be used in a proprietary product is too tempting and has caused some harm to the Wine project. Based on experience, I feel strongly that the potential for harm is great enough that CodeWeavers needs to take two actions. First, we would like to release all new code we develop under an LGPL style license. Second, I would like to open another call for a license change and thereby strongly add my voice to Alexandre's." Obviously you, Jeremy started this discussion. I don't want to sound curious, but I have the feeling that our discussion will be in vain if we don't know about those "events" you can't disclose. I mean suppose that the list reaches a consensus to stay at the BSD license. This wouldn't make a difference would it? You would simply say, sorry: but I have my reasons which I can't disclose and will start a xGPL fork of WINE now... So I think to consider all interests involved we must obviously first KNOW what they are specifically...otherwise we will just be wasting time without touching the really important points(your specific concerns among others...). Best regards, Roland

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RE: Wine license change
by Patrik Stridvall 08 Feb '02

08 Feb '02

> I think that this message as well as many other bring up some > very good > points as to the needs of licensing within the wine project. > Many other > messages have been clearly in the realm of bsd-gpl feudalism. > I think that trying to find a license to fit the needs of the project > without first having a good understanding of the needs of the > project is a > serious error. Yes, that is what I have tried to say in my reply to Jeramy. We must define what we want to license to protect, but more importantly we must define what the we DON'T want the license to protect. Because "What doesn't the license protect?", more popularly known as "What can we get away with?" is the first question ALL new business models will ask. If the answer of that question is "Not Much" it might be very bad for most business module, but even worse if the answer to the question is "I don't know, it depends on your intent" or "I have no idea, the jury is still out" it will be very bad. >From my discussion with Alexandre last time he seems to believe that whether or it was allowed to implement a few function in some DLL in a LGPL Wine by linking to a proprietary library depended on my intent. I reject this absurd idea most violently. However consider for a moment: What if he is right? This means that with a LGPL:ed Wine: If somebody that had some proprietary library and thought hey with this library it should be quite easy to implement these functions in Wine that prevented these cool application to work. Some programming later... Great it works... Now I call Lindows, Red Hat, SuSE (whomever that distribute Wine) and tell them that I can license this library for $5 per end user to you. Some time later... Great at least some them accepted and the money keeps streaming in. Life is good. Questions: Is his intent bad? Would you sue him for violating the LGPL? If he publish his proprietary library function wrappers under the LGPL. If he didn't? What about the Linux distributor? Under what circumstances would you sue it? Another scenario: Joe Hacker has bought a proprietary library to use with his non Wine related hobby. One day he realizes that the one of his hobby related also proprietary Windows application he dual boots to since it never worked under Wine could be made to work by implementing the missing Wine functions with that library. He does so, it takes a weekend. It works. He puts out the patch to Wine under LGPL on a hobby related website for other that also owns the application and the library. He is happy since dual booting is but a memory. Life is good. Questions: Is his intent bad? Will you sue him? If some months or so later the maker of the protrietary library finds the patch and contacts the Linux distribution like in the case above. Will you sue the him, the proprietary library company or the Linux distribution? All this begs the questions: 1. Isn't it so, that as I claimed that the LGPL really doesn't protected this. 2. Or alternatively, if it really does make what some of the people above do illegal, do we REALLY want to use it? > It's pretty obvious that neither the a gpl > license nor a bsd > license are optimal. It only take the observation of the lack > on consensus > to see it. Quite. > All that I can really offer is this suggestion: end feuding > and start a > process to > 1. Gather the requirements to the licensing of the wine project > 2. Determine if any combination of existing licenses can meet the > requirements > 3. If no combination of existing licenses will suffice, write > a license > that does. Fully agree. > Additionally, I advise that everyone abandon there preconceptions of > licensing. There is no mandate that I know of to license the > whole project > under the same license, only use one license for any part of > the project, > only use existing licenses, license any part of the project > to different > groups under the same license. Quite true. However, take care with viral licenses, they might spill over to the other parts all the same.

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Licensing
by Joe Tennies 08 Feb '02

08 Feb '02

I have personally always been a huge fan of the BSD license. It has always seemed to me to be more about standards. I know you guys are angered about TransGaming making their WineX version, but get over it. TransGaming is more than willing to place code back into the community. They are just making sure they can cover their own asses too. With the current state of open-sourced companies and internet companies in general, I think they have a decent plan. Also, switching to the LGPL will not make it impossible for TransGaming to make WineX. This has been discussed on the SDL list lately. All you need to do to make a closed source version of a LGPL library is have the LGPL library make calls into a closed source library. The theory behind the LGPL is fairly simple. Make sure that the LGPLed library can be recompiled if one of its dependancies either stops being made or changes dramatically. Basically, it's there to make sure things link 5 years from now. This will probably be my last message to this list as I am dropping it and going to the Mono project. Have fun!

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Re: Wine license change
by g.russell＠ieee.org 08 Feb '02

08 Feb '02

I think that this message as well as many other bring up some very good points as to the needs of licensing within the wine project. Many other messages have been clearly in the realm of bsd-gpl feudalism. I think that trying to find a license to fit the needs of the project without first having a good understanding of the needs of the project is a serious error. It's pretty obvious that neither the a gpl license nor a bsd license are optimal. It only take the observation of the lack on consensus to see it. All that I can really offer is this suggestion: end feuding and start a process to 1. Gather the requirements to the licensing of the wine project 2. Determine if any combination of existing licenses can meet the requirements 3. If no combination of existing licenses will suffice, write a license that does. Additionally, I advise that everyone abandon there preconceptions of licensing. There is no mandate that I know of to license the whole project under the same license, only use one license for any part of the project, only use existing licenses, license any part of the project to different groups under the same license. Thanks for you ear - Gabriel Russell g.russell(a)ieee.org >Look at the copy protection stuff that transgaming have added to their >tree: they licensed it and thus quite likely can't publish the source >for this - but I still want to see this in the binary only releases >they make :-) Other scenarios I can imagine: drivers for hardware - >think of a company that wants to port their software to Linux via wine >but continue using a dongle or something like that: the dongle code >is quite likely to go into the kernel itself (and may need some support >for that by the wineserver). > Ciao > Jörg

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Undocumented functions: a digest
by Jeremy White 08 Feb '02

08 Feb '02

Thanks to everyone who sent me examples of undocumented information; I have passed that along; I think it will be very helpful. I was hoping to edit it, and make it a bit more definitive, but I seem to have run out of time. So, I thought I'd just post the raw replies here so it didn't vanish into the bit bucket. Cheers, Jeremy

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RE: Dr. Seuss, licensing, and WINE
by Medland, Bill 08 Feb '02

08 Feb '02

> -----Original Message----- > From: Dimitrie O. Paun [mailto:dimi@cs.toronto.edu] > Sent: Friday, February 08, 2002 6:35 AM > To: Brett Glass > Cc: wine-devel(a)winehq.com > Subject: Re: Dr. Seuss, licensing, and WINE > > > On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Brett Glass wrote: > > > --Brett Glass (Who hasn't happened to contribute to WINE > yet, but may do so if > > it remains open source) > > Could you have finished wiht a more dumb line? LGPL _is_ open > source my > friend, go read about it first. > > I don't know about other people, but I'm so tired of these > arguments where > LGPL is 'fascist', 'proprietary', 'not open source', etc. > Once again, we > don't discuss what is important, but we keep arguing about mostly > irrelevant things, just like last time... :( Especially as the OP seems to be in favour of contributing to an "open source" set of code that is used for the basis of a "commercial closed source" product. Bill

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License change: patenting for one year?
by Roland 08 Feb '02

08 Feb '02

Hello, someone here already had the idea of making a patenting scheme. Maybe this would be a good idea. A company can take the code, improve it and doesn't have to give modifications back until one year has passed. That would give them a competitive edge. Users would pay that company to be able to use always the newest versions. After one year, the code has to be contributed and is placed under the xGPL. The disadvantage of this would be that it would slow down the WINE progress or lead to code duplication. Free developers who don't want to wait a year would start duplicating the code that the company already has but doesn't want to give back yet... Maybe it would really be a good idea to open a web-site with a forum for this discussion, or how about another mailing list? I think the problem with this discussion is that we seem to have at least 2 distinctive groups: 1. People who want to make money selling WINE or derivatives == Anti xGPL 2. People who have no financial interest(individual developers) or companies who have another business model than the above == Pro xGPL Of course there are also people from group 2 that are against the xGPL for one reason or another. Ok, how do we solve this conflict? Maybe there is no solution other than splitting up WINE? That means we would have two code bases corresponding to the two conflicting interest groups. I think that the xGPL group will win on the long run because group one would consist of many people who have only a limited interest in sharing back! That means that the codebase wouldn't evolve much over the long run, and we would have more companies like Lindows who simply build their own version of WINE and improve it, without giving back. Of course there probably will be a group of people involved like on FreeBSD but I wonder if the xGPL group wouldn't have more members.... The problem with the actual license is that it has created exactly this kind of situation: Companies don't share back at all or only if certain requirements(incoming profit) have been fulfilled. This effectively created a situation that is similar to the proposed patenting scheme. So basically I see two options A. We make that patenting scheme official, which basically would correspond to the way things are NOW. B. We split WINE in two projects. B is my current prediction of what will happen. In fact CodeWeavers has already announced that this will happen(they will base their code on xGPL no matter what), so it is very obvious. The only alternative is if someone finds an ingenious solution but I doubt it is possible since the involved interests are so antagonistic. We simply cannot sit in the same boat if one group wants to go north, the other south. Roland

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

08 Feb '02

Marcus Meissner <marcus(a)jet.franken.de> wrote: > Hi, hello.... > On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 05:45:36PM -0500, Roger Fujii wrote: > > 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). > License is not equal Copyright. > You don't automatically sign away your Copyright when switching to the GPL. ??? but I didn't mention copyright. I used the word "license" for this very reason. The copyright holder can later change the licensing policies (though the FSF says this is "ethically tainted"). But there still can be a *GPLed copy after the change.... > > 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.... > > Quoting: > When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom of use, > not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that > you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge > for this service if you wish); that you receive source code or can get > it if you want it; that you can change the software and use pieces of > it in new free programs; and that you are informed that you can do ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > these things. I didn't mention cost for the same reason. It seems like a trivial academic exercise to show that something that has LESS restrictions is more "free" than something with more. Hence it is riduculous to say GPL is more "free" than X11/BSD (which is why I wrote that to begin with). Just because something claims it's 'free' doesn't mean it is, just as the "Democractic People's Republic or Korea" isn't democratic by most people's definition of democracy. GPLed programs are certainly infinitely more "free" than propriatary ones, but then, propriatory programs don't try to claim that they're "free" either. > The problem is not other people doing things with my stuff, the problem > is restricting ME as a developer. but that is PRECISELY the issue here, unless you consider someone not contributing is a restriction on a developer. The *GPL clearly restricts how something can be distributed: "rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program" The topic was opened again because there are concerns about how other people are using the source code. Yes, this is a problem, but the tendency is for *GPL advocates to claim that there will be no negative impact which is not the case. -r

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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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RE: Example of ODBC and wine
by Medland, Bill 07 Feb '02

07 Feb '02

Yes unixODBC and DB2 It's easy enough for that. Bill > -----Original Message----- > From: Ricardo [mailto:r00tzz@yahoo.co.uk] > Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2002 9:19 AM > To: wine-devel(a)winehq.com > Subject: Example of ODBC and wine > > > has anyone used wine with a program that conects to an ODBC > database? How > have you set this? I was thinking about FreeTDS but i > configured it and > doesn't know what to do nexe. Any help? > Thanks > Ricardo > > > > >

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