Patrik Stridvall ps@leissner.se writes:
Therefore I'm happy to leave things like DirectX to companies like Transgaming for the time being since people that wants to play games are more likely to be happy with the way they can support Transgaming ie paying a monthly fee.
Then I guess you are also happy to leave OLE support to company Foo, and networking support to company Bar, and multimedia support, common controls, etc. to yet other companies. After all, people who need these features would be happy to support these companies, right? As long as the free version of Wine runs Solitaire we don't need anything else, right? Or is it different because the applications *you* care about need these features but not DirectX?
Using your strict interpretion of the LPGL it will significantly increase the cost of entry to the market, thus requiring higher risk of entering the market, even with a basicly sound business model.
No, IMO it will lower the cost of entry, because more code will be available. So if you want to make money with Wine you won't need to first buy all the pieces you need from the various companies that hold them proprietary. Transgaming could probably never have entered the market if all the development that was done before them had not been released as free software.
Well, I strongly disagree. Wine is supposed to be a free implementation of Windows; if making it successful requires making it non-free, we might as well stop right now.
"He who defend everything, defends nothing"
Need I say more?
What do you suggest defending then? Nothing? The ability to run only your favorite application? I still don't understand your position, and I can't say you seem to really understand it yourself.
Seriously, we made that choice we made in hope that it would be a good one and I think it is to early to say that the choice was a bad one. Changing licenses out of panic is a bad idea. Let calm down and think this through properly.
There is absolutely no panic here, I've been thinking about the opportunity of such a change for months now, if not years. And in any case any change would be very gradual since it only applies to new code.