On Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 08:19:44AM -0600, Jeremy White wrote:
Wine still requires huge capital investments to make it work, and any company that is going to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars is naturally going to demand ownership of the resulting work product. It it were LGPL, it would be an easy negotiation - I'd just say "Sorry, can't do it." End of story.
Just to throw another wrench into the works...
If Codeweavers is the only party releasing Wine code under the LGPL, then Jeremy's licensing fight with clients doesn't get any easier (at least if he's being honest with them ;D), because as the sole copyright holder on the LGPLed code, Codeweavers' hands are not tied by any legal strings when it comes to relicensing.
So there is significant benefit to Codeweavers /and/ to the Wine community if an LGPLed Wine tree thrives: both sides get the benefit of Jeremy having to spend less time arguing licensing points with his clients. When less time is spent arguing over licenses, more time is available for productive coding.
Since Jeremy has stated his intention to release future code changes only under Copyleft, the decision for Wine contributors to make is a simple one: do you believe that the benefits of potential additional corporate, closed-source adopters of Wine outweigh the certain loss of code contributions from Codeweavers, a known active contributor?
Steve Langasek postmodern programmer