On Thu, May 12, 2005 at 08:04:57AM -0400, gslink wrote:
The easiest way to resolve this business with Borland is to contact Borland. They may also have an interest in Wine. If they have no objection to what Wine wants to do then there is no one else to complain. They might even help Wine. Borland probably doesn't even
Borland may have some intrest in Wine (it can be used to run code produced by their compilers, which helps their potential market-share a bit). However, it could also view Wine as a competitor (especially to their Kylix product). I doubt they'd sue Wine developers over this, but it's possible that they have a reciprocal license that would require them to defend patent #5,628,016.
Would Wine be able to proceed if we got the following statement from them?
"Borland hereby grants a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use the methods described in U.S. patent 5,628,016 to the current Wine developers when they use the current LGPL source-code for wine, and to anyone who properly recieves a copy of that source-code or properly creates a derivative work based on it when they use said copy or derivative work."
I think this would satisfy the conditions in section 11 of the LGPL. In absence of communication from Borland, we might also infer this based on their future public statements.
I just don't want to see this turn into another situation like GIF files or PGP 2.x, where one company's patent put all "compatible" implementations on shaky legal ground.