dschwarz@bellatlantic.net wrote:
Consider doing what ghostscript does (http://www.ghostscript.com/). New versions are released under the AFPL license (more restrictive than GPL). Old versions are re-released under GPL when they are about 1 year out of date.
This is fine for the "owners" of the project. It gives them a grace period and makes sure that changes gets worked back in. However, if you are on the outside, it blows, since you must IMMEDIATELY make your changes available (because of the GPL).
How this could be applied to Wine: Going forward, all builds are released under LGPL. They are then re-released one year later under an X11 style license.
This won't work very well since all that this is really requiring is that changes to the changes are LGPLed, but not changes to the base.
What might work is this (though this won't be considered "open" by those self-professed 'champions' of open-source.
BSD/X11 base with the following LGPLish addition: Modifications to 'derived work' must be made available within 12 (or some reasonable period) months of initial publishing under the same terms.
This way, unmodified versions aren't virialized like the GPL, but you will (eventually) have access to any improvements.
-r