On 13 Dec 2001 19:47:42 -0800, Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.com wrote:
David Elliott dfe@tgwbd.org writes:
Umm, do I sense a little Deja Vu here. IIRC Wine's original license had some issues that meant it wasn't GPL compatible. The new license, which I understand is a modified BSD or an X11 license, basically says do whatever you want with it.
The original license was pretty much the same way except for technicalities.
This is so true. Of course now that the cat is out of the bag maybe a more pertinent question is what happens if we make new code LGPL or some such? Do we still have companies using Wine code but using the older versions under the X11 license? Then we'd really have a mess.
Not really; people using Wine and who don't want to switch to the new license would simply have to avoid merging in new code. Note that if we go LGPL, each dll would be considered a separate library, so companies could choose which ones they want to merge. For instance Transgaming could freely merge into their tree any new code that doesn't touch the DirectX dlls; of course they would then have to release the dlls they merged under the LGPL, but they could still keep the DirectX ones proprietary.
The license change would only take full effect in the long term, when the current versions of Wine are too obsolete to be a reasonable option for someone starting a new project.
[...] Do we really want to send the message that in order to use the wine code your program must be free software?
This would be the message if we were to use the GPL, which I think we all agree would not be really possible if we still want to be able to run proprietary applications. With the LGPL the message would be that you can use the code pretty much as you want, but if you change it you have to release the changes.
I cannot come up with a reasonable choice here. Either way has drawbacks. We've been through this before and went with the X11 license. Maybe it's time to rethink that decision... maybe not. All I can say is that I for one would like to know how current developers stand on this issue. Has anyone's thoughts/opinions changed significantly?
Mine at least yes... I used to think that proprietary versions of Wine wouldn't matter, since we already have to compete against the ultimate proprietary Wine (the one from Redmond). But I see now that there are ways to make the code kind-of-proprietary that can actually cause more harm to Wine than purely proprietary ones, and I think we should do something to address this issue.
What do others think?
One possible trap to getting toward a GPL. If I remember right, the last time, you had to get consensus. If "pseudo-open-source" company had contributed code, you would need their permission and they don't have to agree.
john