At 08:13 AM 2/14/2002, Christopher Dewey wrote:
Brett, you continue to ignore that the (L)GPL implicitly treats *everyone* as programmers, regardless of their occupation, motives, intent, or what they actually end up doing with the software.
Not true. It singles out the activities in which only professional programmers need to engage in order to make a living, and penalizes that group specifically by attempting to prevent them from making a living. "The GNU Manifesto" explicitly states this intent.
The issue at hand is that neither the LGPL, nor the current Wine license meet every Wine developer's needs and goals, with the consequense that the development effort spent on Wine may be slowed or fragmented.
Is that possible? What if the goal of some of the developers is simply to sabotage the business models of others?
It's a real problem, and a compromise is required.
The current license is far and away the best compromise. The (L)GPL is not a compromise; it is an extreme. The public domain is the other extreme. The X11 license sits in the middle.
--Brett