At 06:48 PM 2/13/2002, David Elliott wrote:
The main problem with LGPL is that once we go there we can never go back.
I agree.
Wine cannot stay X11 free-for-all forever.
Why not? BSD has. X11 has. Apache has.
Reminds me of one of Roger Ebert's columns about the movie "It's a Wonderfull Life". Because the movie is now public domain, anyone can use the original print for whatever purpose. This includes colorizing it and then selling the colorized version for a lot of cash (thanks Ted... yeah right). The colorized version is a bastardization of the movie and is one of those cases where you almost wish that copyrights didn't expire. Especially considering that the director and the much of the cast were still alive to see this horrible, horrible thing.
I happen to agree, though I don't think it's "horrible" -- just weird. The best thing we can do is vote with our feet and not buy or rent that version. The same would be true of a bad commercial version of WINE.
However, the X11 license has the great advantage that it is extremely flexible. So flexible that anyone who wanted to could take the tree and release it under any other license.
Actually, no. You can't change the license on existing code. But you can combine it with code that's licensed differently.
Looking at some of the more popular BSD-type licensed projects, many of them have this sort of non-profit set-up. Apache would be the one that springs to mind immediately, I'm sure there are others.
FreeBSD and NetBSD do as well. But they administer the trademarks and handle contributions; they don't try to restrict access to the code.
--Brett