I probably am going to regret starting this conversation, but luckly I havn't seen any of the traditional flame-war mentality sneaking in yet.
My 5c:
I -have- had to deal with companies stealing my GPL code and releasing it in on-the-shelf commercial products. The GPL protected my rights very well when said companies were confonted. The GPL is only weak in that most people using the GPL do not have resources to enforce it.
If it came to that (which I doubt it will, as the GPL does have a large part in the fact it discourages being stolen... for the PR points if nothing else!) I'm sure the WINE project could find the ability to enforce it.
Meanwhile, I do agree that changing the fundemental wine license for libraries to LGPL is a good thing. Legally, wine is entitled to do so. Anybody submitting code back to wine has done so under the modified BSD license, from modified versions of code originally copyrighted to Wine, thusly transfering licence rights back to the original owner under a GPL-compatable license.
The LGPL will protect WINEs fundemental core. Naturally, Transgaming currently use a BSD licensed version, and may continue to do so. If they wish to import any new modifications from a LGPL'ed wine however - they must accept the new licence on the library they are importing code to/from. If Transgaming, or a third party, develop a whole new library from scratch, which is a .so or other dynamically loaded library, the LGPL allows them to do so with no repocusion. It's all-in-all a win/win situation. Transgaming can protect their IP, and Wine can protect poaching of their code from other sources for things which do not benefit the wine core.
Let's look at the legality.. the clause below protects a large portion of the objections most people may have with WINE becoming LGPL'ed:
d) If a facility in the modified Library refers to a function or a table of data to be supplied by an application program that uses the facility, other than as an argument passed when the facility is invoked, then you must make a good faith effort to ensure that, in the event an application does not supply such function or table, the facility still operates, and performs whatever part of its purpose remains meaningful.
This protects many operations of WINEs functionality. In good faith, we have tried to provide alternate functionality to allow the program to operate without the presence of external files.
In the case of embedded systems, there are many libdl replacements out there. I know not of a single embedded system that wine could EVER feasibly run on that doesn't include some way of getting dynamic linking capability.
As another issue, Lindows can simply be considered another distribution. Fundementally it uses Linux, Wine and other free software (under GPL, LGPL and BSD licences). They have already stated they will respect the respective licenses, and open source to the components of thier code that IS under a license requiring such. Thus there is no conflict.
Regards, | Any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from | a perl script. Ender | (James Brown) | [Nehahra, EasyCuts, PureLS, www.QuakeSrc.org]
On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Bill Medland wrote:
Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 14:51:51 -0800 From: Bill Medland medbi01_1@accpac.com To: wine-devel@winehq.com Subject: Re: Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches
"Alexandre Julliard" julliard@winehq.com wrote in message news:874rmvggpn.fsf@mail.wine.dyndns.org...
Patrik Stridvall ps@leissner.se writes:
In short: Should the Wine project wait until you release or should it not?
That's certainly a question we have to think about, but I think there is a deeper issue: should we continue to release under a license that allows people to use our own code to hurt the project?
My concern is not so much about Transgaming, I trust that Gav means to do the right thing, even if I don't entirely agree with his methods. But I'm worried that if Transgaming succeeds, it will set a precedent that others will follow, who may have no desire at all to do the right thing for Wine. What will happen if 5 different dlls are improved and released by 5 different companies under 5 different non-free licenses?
It's been quite fascinating watching this discussion; it's nice to see that such issues are covered. It raises two issues for me:
- Where does Lindows fit into all this? Does anyone know what's happening
there? 2. Is the current wine license as loose as it appears to me? My understanding is that "the license" is the file "LICENSE" at the root of the cvs tree and basically allows anyone to do anything with it provided they keep the license in there (and respect copyright). I keep seeing quotes and things that suggest wine is under GPL, LGPL, BSD etc.; I presume that they are simple ill-informed.
Bill