IANAL, yada, yada
[nor can my involvement with Wine be considered anything more than minor]
Patrik wrote:
Companies in this group have several choices:
- Don't use new improvement in the main Wine tree, only resync then a new major version of the application should be released.
- Maintain a tree by themselves, continually resyncing in order to make even minor version take advantage of new improvements in the new Wine tree.
I just want to throw a couple of ideas out about using an LGPL license. There's a lot of people with a heck of lot more at stake than me, and ultimately they deserve to have their opinions weighed more heavily than mine. Ultimately these ideas stem from the practice of licensing software rather than the theory (which is where this thread was headed).
First, the LGPL doesn't really ever give a time frame for modifications to be released back. We can safely assume that it means "in a timely manner", since in practice this is how it works. I think we could collectively agree that a company such as Transgaming could be allowed a grace period in order to submit their modifications back. Whether this is a week or a year can be debated. If for no other reason than to ensure clean code. Now you may argue that a year is too long, but keep in mind that the modifications do have to be released, and if it takes them a year the amount of work required for a resync may impact other operations.
Second, the LGPL doesn't state how the modifications have to be released. In practice this is done electronically via patch files or access to a modified tree. But there's no reason why the modifications couldn't be released on handwritten post-it notes available by request only. In this manner there is a non-trivial amount of work required to integrate the changes.
------ Brian Vincent vinn@theshell.com