Brett Glass wrote:
At 08:13 AM 2/14/2002, Christopher Dewey wrote:
Brett, you continue to ignore that the (L)GPL implicitly treats *everyone* as programmers, regardless of their occupation, motives, intent, or what they actually end up doing with the software.
Not true. It singles out the activities in which only professional programmers need to engage in order to make a living, and penalizes that group specifically by attempting to prevent them from making a living. "The GNU Manifesto" explicitly states this intent.
Many professional programmers do their work "for hire", with no say in the license applied to their work, whether it's GPL, BSD or MS-EULA. The GNU Manifesto is off-topic and irrelevant to this discussion; the FSF does not speak for me, nor does it speak for the Wine developers, I dare say.
The issue at hand is that neither the LGPL, nor the current Wine license meet every Wine developer's needs and goals, with the consequense that the development effort spent on Wine may be slowed or fragmented.
Is that possible? What if the goal of some of the developers is simply to sabotage the business models of others?
There have been discussions on Linux gaming fora wrt whether TransGaming and Wine were sabotaging Loki Games' business model. It's bullshit, of course. Sabotage is a bullshit argument here, too. I've seen *nothing* in six years as a Wine user and following Wine development that suggest any of the developers acting in bad faith toward the whole of the Wine community.
But more importantly, your accusations of sabotage, and your diatribe against the FSF and Rihcard Stallman do not belong on this list.
It's a real problem, and a compromise is required.
The current license is far and away the best compromise. The (L)GPL is not a compromise; it is an extreme. The public domain is the other extreme. The X11 license sits in the middle.
It's the best for you, perhaps. Jeremy White has expressed that it's no longer the best compromise for *his* business model. You clearly have no respect for that, but then you're not arguing honestly here; you have a political agenda and an axe to grind. Please do it elsewhere.