Ove Kaaven ovehk@ping.uio.no writes:
As for the license of Wine, I was among the ones opposing the LGPL last time it was discussed, and I have not changed my mind. I feel that Wine is most widely useful if it keeps the X11 license, and usefulness is more important in my mind than making it 50% harder for companies to "steal" the code. If X11 is so bad for large projects such as Wine, why is the largest project of all, XFree86 (and associated projects like DRI), still using it, even though its maintainer would have the power to switch to e.g. the LGPL or even GPL with a snap of the fingers ("sublicensing" it)?
A thing to keep in mind is that X11 got almost killed by licensing issues and the proliferation of closed source vendor versions. If the XFree86 team hadn't picked it up, there probably wouldn't be a free version of X11 available today. This is something that could happen to Wine; and if it does happen, will we find enough people to do what XFree86 has been doing for X11? Maybe, and maybe not. When I hear people like Patrik saying that it's OK for parts of Wine to become proprietary because we can't do everything anyway, I'm worried.