On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 09:35:46AM +0100, Stefan Görling wrote:
Just my curiosity,
Can you do some kind of estimate (you don't have to count all the votes again...) On how this has changed during the discussion?
I know for myself that I was for LGPL as the discussion started but the latest couple of days have really changed my mind, listening to the different arguments in the debate. If the same thing applies to others, those figures might be misrepresentative.
I didn't vote because I don't really think I should (I rarely use wine, although I follow every message in wine-devel) so this message probably doesn't carry much weight at all (since I'm no developer and I didn't even vote anyway).
If you weren't too impressed by that, go read another message 'cause this one will bore you :)
I've never been much of a license person, but I did skim the GPL license and the LGPL also, to a lesser extent and quite liked the idea. The BSD one always seemed to be too loose and too much chance that it would lead to a company taking someone's hard work that they did for the community. In the past few days, after trying my best to catch up on wine-devel (still 170 license-related messages to read!) I've really begun to see what the BSD license is all about and that it isn't quite so dumb after all.
This all happened sometime between Alexandre calling for opinions and announcing the voting result.
I don't know about other people, but had I voted before, it would probably have been for an LGPLish license (if only because Brett Glass was annoying me with his strong statements against *GPL, RMS and the FSF, etc). Apologies to Brett - I'm starting to see your points now (at least about the licenses) although I think if you'd put your points a little gentler (wrong word but the closest I can think of) and with less of the anti-FSF rhetoric, maybe people would have found it easier to see your side of the argument.
Now, I'd probably prefer a BSD license - I can see its advantages for a large, well-established codebase.
GPL might be worth using for something small and simple that anyone could write themselves, although if that were the case, it probably doesn't make any difference whether it's BSD or (L)GPL.
*shrug* Not saying there should be another vote but I wonder if I was the only one who switched sides, so to speak - have to see what happens with the two trees I guess.
...I'm not a bad looser, I simply want to assure that the figures actually reflects the current situation.
If anyone was persuaded to favour BSD/X11/etc over LGPL, etc then you'll see them working on a BSD tree of Wine, not the GPL one, I suspect. The LGPL camp will work on the LGPL (or whatever) tree and the I-don't-care people will probably join them (since the LGPL tree would become the main development branch).
I wonder how many of the 'LGPL' people were actually very strongly in favour of a copyleft license... oh well.
It's been an interesting debate and one really worth watching (well, reading :)
Hope Wine continues to become an even bigger success whatever license it adopts (although the ability to run Exile from spidweb.com would be nice :)
When I get the time, I'll try looking into why it doesn't work (some GDI thing IIRC)
Egads, what a long message. Sorry guys (+ gals?)