At 12:10 PM 2/14/2002, Roger Fujii wrote:
well, I think the assumption here was that winecorp would always release an lgped (or whatever viral license) version of the tree, so that 'normal' use would not be inhibited.
The implication here is that the use of freely available code as the basis of commercial products is somehow not "normal." I'm not sure how you can say this, because it is really very common. Every modern operating system contains code from BSD, for example.
Commercial entities will have no guarantee that they'll be allowed to use even their own contributions -- especially if their competitors are part of the body that grants permissions. Politics can also rear their head, with favoritism toward specific vendors.
you do have a point - given that this licensing issue started up again because of what appears to be competitive/political reasons, I guess one shouldn't ignore the possible influence it might have in the future.
Politics always seem to get in the way in the world of freely distributable software. For example, the trademark "FreeBSD" is currently owned by one of the distributors of FreeBSD, not by the FreeBSD Foundation. It was supposed to transfer the trademark, but never has. In theory, this could allow it to shut down the other distributors unless they used a different name for the software. Linux also has its politics; witness the multi-way tug of war between ESR, Perens, and Stallman.
--Brett