At 07:47 PM 13/12/2001 -0800, you wrote:
What do others think?
I feel rather dismayed by the whole discussion.
First to all you lawyers who have already posted their legal opinion, you can dismiss all that I will say : I'm not a lawyer and I don't want to be one. It's only a low-level common sense point of view, what I think is right or wrong.
First a link : http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html
This is the philosophy of the gnu project, from the guy who designed the cornerstone : the Gpl (I will say Gpl even if what is in question here is LGpl : from my point of view, it is only a technicality) You will notice the enormous number of terms evoking public rights, user rights, help your neighbour philosophy.
I have nothing against that by itself.
However, what I find surprising is the use of this philosophy. You'll find many examples of that, in another of this thread's posts for example :
A few years back, Ingo Molnar (or Linux Kernel fame), wrote to the wine-devel list saying that he really wanted to contribute the project but didn't because of the lack of protection of his work from the licence.
Here is the keyword in my opinion : *his* work. in this particular case Ingo Molnar could mean the right thing of course, I can't say for sure from a short citation - but there is so much more of this stuff. Here is more if you want, from another poster :
I -have- had to deal with companies stealing my GPL code
Here this is so much more clear. *My* code. They have stolen from *me*. Where are the users's right ?
I don't want to say that it is all right to use Gpl code in proprietary works. But I think that any legal (real) action should - morally - only be done when an user has been really wronged.
I think that a user getting proprietary work including gpl'ed code could ask for a court to order the release of the full code of the app he bought. He could ask for getting his money back for all the licenses (beyond the first) that he bought, since he had the right to manage the installation of additional copies himself. He could ask the court to sweep aside any Eula limiting the company responsibility since the hiding of Gpl code removed his right to fix the bugs himself. All this means civil litigation, damages, money.
From my - common sense, not legalistic - point of view,
that would be entirely appropriate. In this context, the Gpl developer could associate to the first legal action, so that his *moral* right could be recognized and - more importantly - the infringement proved.
But a 'pure' Gpl (not the double licensing sort) developer suing for himself, without any actual user wronged, is not morally acceptable in my opinion.
The usual argument about Gpl, that courts would not accept the action because there is no material interest (money) for Linus Torvalds, for example, in Linux, is akin to mine, but my point of view is not legalistic.
This is not right because if he asks for money, he is doing a pitiful mockery of the generous philosophy expressed in the Web page I referenced. If he asks for the society to punish the deed, a penal action in opposition to a purely civil action, he is doing something even more distateful. He is asking the society to consider the infringement on his rights something so important that the doer should be punished even in the absence of any tangible damage for anyone. I think that he is justifying the idea of 'intellectual property' : copyright infringement is stealing, infringers are thieves (criminals?) (words quoted because I refuse the idea entirely - and yes, I'm aware that Gav State himself approves of it :-)), like the society can punish an (old-fashioned) thief even if by mistake what he stole was entirely valueless.
I believe that in your approach (I mean here you, Alexandre Julliard), as in the case of the developers I quoted, I have not heard much about users rights.
If you cared that much for users, as is implied by the Gpl license, the work made by Codeweavers for Borland would be repellent : yes, the code (all of it ?) has been released to Wine. But Kylix users don't have the possibility to get the Wine source code used; they don't have the right to get latest Wine code and maybe fix bugs. This is scandalous from a Gpl point of view, yet no Wine developer has ever said anything against it.
Why what was a mere possibility before has become urgent now ? Transgaming, of course. Transgaming is, in your words, taking away the 'mindshare' of users and developers.
Gav replied that end-users were not harmed since they got the source anyway, but it has not mollified you - to the contrary.
I'm sorry but this sounds rather selfish. You have entirely the right to be selfish about your (enormous) work of course, but a proprietary license is more logical in this case. You want to use the Gpl as a tool, but I don't see a lot of respect for the philosophy that is behind it.
What I find even more disturbing in what you said is the allusion (when replying to Patrick) to a future tightening of copyright laws, a tendency that is in my opinion directly linked to the idea of copyright, patents, etc being 'intellectual property' assets, and infringers thieves stealing them. You seemed to welcome the additional protection it would give Wine.
What I hear is : more Dmitry Sklyarovs. More programmers in jail. Is this what you want ? Are you really so eager to send legal injunctions to people ? No one should think that in a legal action the programmers doing the actual work will be left alone and the 'suits' will go to jail. This is not how this world works (not that I think that the 'suits' deserve it anyway) Don't think also that you can avoid that easily : it's said that Adobe never intended for Dmitry to be jailed, and they backed away as soon as it happened. But he stayed in jail nevertheless.
I believe that the freedom privation that someone sent to jail is suffering is more grievous that the privation that an user suffers when he has no access to the code of his application (in most cases - there may be exceptional cases, but certainly not *computer games*) and is not proportionate to the deed. That's a very important reason for which I am afraid to hear Gpl developers brag about threatenings they can make to people 'stealing' 'their' code.
I have two more practical remarks to finish my ramblings :
1) if Wine turns into a legal machine hunting 'intellectual property' 'thieves' (and there is *a lot* of money involved with Win32 api of course), it could get some really bad public opinion. I think that one of the frail walls protecting Wine from legal harassement is public opinion disliking people using lawyers instead of competition. Be done by as you did, could say the public opinion later - when the MS lawyers come.
2) You seem to think that Transgaming or similar companies are or could be responsible for the low Wine mindshare among developers I don't think this is explaining even 1% of the problem. There are much more bigger reasons for Wine not attracting and - more importantly - not keeping developers. I don't think this particular discussion is important now, though.
Gerard