On Thu, 14 Feb 2002 16:10, Roland wrote:
At 11:31 AM 2/8/02 -0700, Brett Glass wrote:
Perhaps a simple economic analysis would help to assuage those egos.
[SNIP]
The (L)GPL destroys this delicately balanced symbiotic relationship by making it impossible for the vendor to add unique value. As a result, the scenario described above can't happen, and it's a lose/lose rather than a win/win. The
I agree with most of what you said, but have a few NEW questions:
- Companies that benefit from WINE in this way have no incentive to
contribute back. So why should they? That means that this kind of companies are of no big help to WINE, so why should we help them with the licensing scheme?
Are you saying that because a company has no incentive to contribute that we should force them even though they (Lindows and TransGaming) are contributing? I do not mean to be rude, but that sounds a little spiteful.
- Companies like CodeWeavers that have a different business model
probably would share code back even with the xGPL. They don't lose anything for doing it. And with the xGPL they don't have to fear that a competitor will make money out of their work.
If they will share regardless of the license, there is no reason to change the license for this.
In fact any producer of a Windows app is a potential contributer to WINE, since he will help to make its app run under Linux. A xGPLed WINE would help ensure that the improvements made by those companies come back to the community. This of course without loss to the contributer, since selling WINE will not be his business.
The license can be BSD, X11, Apache, LGPL, GPL or MS-EULA and have the same effect on these companies, therefore, a license change for this reason is moot.
So after all it seems that maybe xGPL is an advantage, even if it prevents some companies from making money from WINE.
I have still not seen a good reason to change the license.
What do you think about that?
Personally, I think the movement to change the license is political as I have yet to read a reason to change it that was not about enforcing code contributions. This is not including Jeremy's request which I think is commercial in nature.
Sean -------------- scf@farley.org