Jeremy White wrote:
Okay, let me drop the analogy and come back to straightforward facts. If I believe in the LGPL, and release all of my code to WineHQ under the BSD despite that, then I am a fool. Transgaming, Lindows, name your new competitor, each of them can take the best of my work and use it in their product....
So, I think there are several fundamental problems:
1. The current license encourages forks. We have the WineX fork; I think that Lindows is still formulating their strategy, but they have publicly stated that they like having some proprietary pieces, this certainly suggests another fork of Wine.... 2. The current license discourages competitors from releasing their code.... In hindsight, if I had it to do over again, I would have held out all code we had done over the past year or two. Where would Wine and Transgaming be if we had done that? 3. The current license is harmful to the growth of Wine, because it creates a murky, uncertain ground. ... Having unwritten rules is foolish, IMO.... Well, a Copyleft license provides potential corporate citiziens with written rules. Second, it clarifies the code issues. Right now, say I wanted to work on a game. Well, gosh, just how should I do that? Should I work against the WineX tree? But if I do that, I can't really talk about it on wine-devel, and I can't really share my work with others. Ah heck, maybe Transgaming will fix my game. I'm just going to reboot over to Windows. And if you don't think that's a serious problem, just look at the Wine project historically. Over the past five years, game related patches have overwhelmingly dominated wine-devel. Over the past 12-18 months of Transgaming? Virtually dead....
Well said. Jeremy has laid out a powerful argument for the switch to LGPL, and even why Transgaming ought to support it.
p.s. For the record, in my mind, Dan Kegel qualifies as a major contributor to Wine. It is through his hard work that we have a chance that the U.S. court system will put into place systems that will make Wine development easier and protect Wine from predatory action from Microsoft.
*blush* Aww, thanks!
- Dan