On 2002.02.13 13:52 Ian Schmidt wrote:
[BIG SNIP]
To put this back on topic, I don't see any immediate benefits from a LGPL
license. If we knew what the threat to Wine Jeremy hinted at was, it might make for a more informed discussion. I also liked Gav's idea about WineCorp a lot as a compromise, and I'd love to see more dicussion of that and less licensing flaming.
Agreed. In my private mail to Alexandre I mentioned that we need some sort of "Wine Foundation". Apparently Gav has the same idea and at least one other person (you) seems to like it too.
Personally while I can't say if the LGPL would be absolutely wonderful for Wine I don't think it'd be horrible and thus I'll support whatever is chosen.
The main problem with LGPL is that once we go there we can never go back. Well, we can if all the people who made LGPL contributions agree to a license change, but unlike the last license change where this was possible because there wasn't anybody (to my knowledge) attached to the old license, there may very well be contributors to an LGPL codebase who would NOT want to release under X11.
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?
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.
However, the X11 license has the great advantage that it is extremely flexible. So flexible that anyone who wanted to could take the tree and release it under any other license. If we were to switch the tree to LGPL we would loose this advantage and would essentially be locked into terms that will always be at least as restrictive as the LGPL. If we were to set up some sort of Wine Foundation, or WineCorp as Gav calls it, then we could require contributors to license their code to WineCorp with unlimited rights knowing that WineCorp is established to act in the best interest of the Wine project. Perhaps a board could vote on whether to allow companies like TransGaming or Lindows to make a binary release and perhaps they could set conditions to the contracts. In order to get these types of licenses the companies would have to at least fork over some cash which would be used to cover the costs of running WineCorp. I would suggest that WineCorp be legally incorporated as a non-profit organization.
Looking at some of the more popular BSD-type licensed projects, many of them have this sort of non-profit set-up. Apache would be the one that springs to mind immediately, I'm sure there are others.
Anyway, I think I have written enough for now. I am really interested in discussing this, and I hope that by writing this I will have sparked some sort of discussion among the rest of the developers. I'm hoping the reason Gav didn't get very much response is more because everyone was waiting for the next guy to respond and not because no-one would be interested.
-Dave