(Reposted, as I just realised my Pine roles wern't sending this from the right address :)
Regards, | It's always bad news in computing.. and beware | of anything claming to be good news - because | its probably a virus. - Salmon Days Ender | (James Brown) | [Nehahra, EasyCuts, PureLS, www.QuakeSrc.org]
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2002 08:44:52 +0800 (WST) From: "J.Brown (Ender/Amigo)" ender@enderboi.com To: Brett Glass brett@lariat.org Cc: wine-devel@winehq.com Subject: Re: Wine license change
John Carmack made an intresting point, he releases ID softwares older releases under the GPL. Why? Because after originally releasing an engine after a BSD-esque license, a project done some very major work to the engine... and then lost it in a harddrive crash. So his -main- reason for using the GPL is to prevent work done in the community from being lost.
He really should take the time to back up his drives. ;-) But, assuming that he wishes to use this rather unusual backup mechanism, why would the GPL be any better at this than a BSD-style license?
Sorry, let me clarify that point... the major work that was lost was done by a COMMUNITY project, not one of ID's in-house ones. His point is that as the xGPL forces the release of source code with any binaries, so any valuable work like this won't be lost to the community.
This has intresting implications for wine too. It's nice to say that Codeweavers/Transgaming/Lindows/etc might feed slice of code 'x' back to Wine at 'i' time in the future. Of course, if said company goes bust (sorry guys, but this IS the post .com era ;), there is a chance that code could be lost for good.
- Ender