David Elliott dfe@tgwbd.org wrote:
Thus what we really need is some entity that will always have an unlimited license to the complete wine codebase to do with it as it decides. I question assigning copyrights away from myself and to anyone else, is there some reason why signing an unlimited use license wouldn't be acceptable (and thus developers would still retain their own copyright) or is that effectively how it works anyway?
This scheme would make the license awkward, because you have to add in "oh, by the way, all the contributions you make will be given to winecorp with an unrestricted license" clause. It is far cleaner and simpler to require contributions to assign the copyright. OpenOffice does this.
Wine cannot stay X11 free-for-all forever. Reminds me of one of Roger Ebert's columns about the movie "It's a Wonderfull Life". Because the movie is now public domain, anyone can use the original print for whatever purpose. This includes colorizing it and then selling the colorized version for a lot of cash (thanks Ted... yeah right). The colorized version is a bastardization of the movie and is one of those cases where you almost wish that copyrights didn't expire. Especially considering that the director and the much of the cast were still alive to see this horrible, horrible thing. Wine is very much in the same position here. While we are not quite public domain we are so close that any distinction is a moot point.
*GPL wouldn't prevent the above either. Any "open source" license would let the above happen. As I said before, "freedom means others can do what you don't like"
-r