On Thu, Dec 13, 2001 at 07:47:42PM -0800, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
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?
I might not have contributed much (one measily patch), but as far as I can see the only hurt that potentially can get done is less incentive to work on core wine, and less to use it by users (and thus maybe less incentive to develop etc etc). I'm not sure how much this allready has happened, for all I know it has been WineX where the d3d, Installshield and other "game related" stuff has been happening. Of course, that may be because I'm relatively new to the development.
Personally I believe TransGaming will channel all this back, maybe they can do certain parts (IS) before they reach their goals as set out in their Business Model, which has happened before I believe. In the relationship with TransGaming it would be nice if these "premature" submissions could be made known, scheduled, or some such so that the rest of us knows what is going on. Knowing there is code growing that makes certain "juicy" bits work is exciting (to me at least), and knowing that it isn't totally free dampens that excitement a bit. I am not commercially involved with wine, so that is pretty much all I feel.
I have no idea how this will work when they have their subscriber base, as subscribers can cancel their account a month later (I think, I have no real knowledge of how this works). So directly working on core wine might not be a sensible idea (then again, I have no real business knowledge either :). Something along the line of monthly merges mayhaps ? And probally pieces of coherent code (say, d3d8). Anyway, this is something for TransGaming to establish, and I hope they reach 20,000 subscribers soon.
More on a theoretical train of thought, other companies (has anyone had contact with Lindows yet ?) might do this also, and with not so good motives. I don't think the threat of one of those overtaking wine in popularity is big, and there will always be loyal supportes of the core wine (the hurd is not dead) so we should be able to plug along and implement everything ourselves. I personally do not care much for marketshare, having more people switch to open source OSes does appeal to me, but I would be content also when it would be just me and other free-software freaks *cough*.
To conclude this rather long rant, I think the current license is ok.
-- Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.com
LarstiQ / Wouter van Heyst