On Thursday 21 March 2002 11:16 am, you wrote:
At 05:35 PM 3/20/02 -0800, Jason Phillips wrote:
Working off of and submitting to the official LGPL Wine source would also obviously be a great help too. Having a proprietary code fork doesn't really help the official Wine out that much, especially if it's never merged back in.
Why would they submit anything to the LGPL fork? Lindows can't use code from the LGPL. So they probably and hopefully are gonna submit code to the X11 fork, which was WINEs original license btw... Thus the LGPL fork is certainly not the official Wine. In fact, after the fork we have now at least two "official" WINEs...
Roland
First of all, my bad for even mentioning anything license related. Let's call truce before Brett Glass shows up. ;-)
The main point though is that it takes code contributed back under either license, or both, to benefit wine. There's no reason why this can't be done. Many companies have worked under the model of contributing to open source projects, e.g. Cygnus and gcc, RedHat, IBM, etc. And CodeWeavers is already doing this for Wine.
Why should it be done? Well, like Michael R originally pointed out, a single company working on their own fork of the code is going to have a much harder and more expensive time than using the "communal" one used and developed by anyone freely/openly. That's the "trick" of open source projects: high visibility of bugs, common standards, and widespread support of developers worldwide, etc. And actually, Wine had a different kind of license before it switched over to X11, the one that starts with a G. Something I learned at the confernece...