Alexandre Julliard wrote:
Roger Fujii rmf@lookhere.com writes:
What are you talking about? What do you think is sitting on www.x.org?
It's free today. It wasn't free back when X11R6.4 was released. The Open Group backed down on their attempt to make it non-free, mostly IMO because of the community pressure and the existence of XFree86.
It had very little to do with xfree86 - xfree could continue one the 6.3 base that they were on. Look at what the reasoning for the license change was: http://archives.seul.org/seul/leaders/Apr-1998/msg00022.html It seems like they were trying to catch the small fry from profiting from their work. Sound familiar? The problem is that there is no way of doing this without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
and if it does happen, will we find enough people to do what XFree86 has been doing for X11? Maybe, and maybe not. When I hear people like Patrik saying that it's OK for parts of Wine to become proprietary because we can't do everything anyway, I'm worried.
If wine was even CLOSE to being complete, I would agree with you.
But you cannot change the license once it is mostly complete; by then it will be too late.
If it was mostly complete, what would it be too late for?
Patrik Stridvall ps@leissner.se wrote:
Why would you want to change the license when it is mostly complete?
There will be very little reason for companies to enter the market at that time and why try to make it difficult for the few that might.
I was using the following lines of thinking: If it were mostly complete, any changes would most likely be the result of bug fixes or minor improvements.
In the end, if you look at the larger projects (mozilla, openoffice, perl), you will see that any of them uses a straight *gpl scheme. My suggestion is that if you are going to change it, change it to something like a currently existing project that has commericial involvement (mozilla/openoffice).
-r