Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.com wrote:
Ove Kaaven ovehk@ping.uio.no writes:
As for the license of Wine, I was among the ones opposing the LGPL last time it was discussed, and I have not changed my mind. I feel that Wine is most widely useful if it keeps the X11 license, and usefulness is more important in my mind than making it 50% harder for companies to "steal" the code. If X11 is so bad for large projects such as Wine, why is the largest project of all, XFree86 (and associated projects like DRI), still using it, even though its maintainer would have the power to switch to e.g. the LGPL or even GPL with a snap of the fingers ("sublicensing" it)?
A thing to keep in mind is that X11 got almost killed by licensing issues and the proliferation of closed source vendor versions.
You understanding of X11 is pretty flawed. X11 had closed parts of its implementation practically from the very beginning. Look at the original X11 contributers. It was DEC, SUN, IBM... The main reason for the dry spell was that it became a mature product. Why tinker with stuff that basically works? Vendors, quite unlike the GNU people, really resist changing things without a good reason. I think the current interest in the X project was due to the advent of so many graphics cards plus 3d/video. Look at gnuemacs - it's GPLed, and had a really long dry spell. Was the lack of interest the result of the licensing?
If the XFree86 team hadn't picked it up, there probably wouldn't be a free version of X11 available today.
What are you talking about? What do you think is sitting on www.x.org?
This is something that could happen to Wine;
Wine should be so lucky as to be accepted like X11.....
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 given its current state, I think that a *gpl license would just discourage companies from even looking at wine (I can't see why any company would like *GPL over X11 so long as they are not the givER - this is not to say they won't accept *gpl, just as to what the preference would be). And given that IMHO, a lot of wine work to be done (looking at Direct* and other M$ stuff) falls under the unpleasant column (ie, most people won't do this for fun), discouraging commercial work doesn't seem to be the way to go.
-r
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.
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.
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
Roger Fujii rmf@lookhere.com writes:
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.
They were trying to prevent commercialisation; this is absolutely not what the LGPL is about. Actually what they did is very similar to the Transgaming approach; the code is available but you have to pay if you want to make money from it. This is *not* what I'm suggesting.
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).
I must have missed something here. Both mozilla and openoffice are basically using LGPL plus another license. Is this what you are suggesting? why would that be better than straight LGPL? and what would the other license be?
On 17 Dec 2001 12:44:40 -0800 Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.com wrote:
AJ> > In the end, if you look at the larger projects (mozilla, openoffice, perl), you will AJ> > see that any of them uses a straight *gpl scheme. My suggestion is that if you are AJ> > going to change it, change it to something like a currently existing project that AJ> > has commericial involvement (mozilla/openoffice). AJ> AJ> I must have missed something here. Both mozilla and openoffice are AJ> basically using LGPL plus another license. Is this what you are AJ> suggesting? why would that be better than straight LGPL? and what AJ> would the other license be?
Just FYI - mozilla actually discourages using MPL and encourages GPL/LGPL (see their FAQ).
Regards, Nerijus
On Mon, 17 Dec 2001, Roger Fujii wrote:
would be). And given that IMHO, a lot of wine work to be done (looking at Direct* and other M$ stuff) falls under the unpleasant column (ie, most people won't do this for fun), discouraging commercial work doesn't seem to be the way to go.
And how, pray you tell, is that beneficial in _any_way_ to Wine, if there is no guarantee of seeing that code? Why should Wine care? Why should we?
Saying 'someday' is not good enough. Without a bound, it's meaningless. What if M$ says: we will eventually open source Windows. Will that make you happy? But more importantly, does it _mean_ anything. I'm afraid it does not (and that can actually be proven logically:)).
-- Dimi.
In article 3C1DCE8B.6B1BEEF2@lookhere.com you wrote: ...
If wine was even CLOSE to being complete, I would agree with you.
...
would be). And given that IMHO, a lot of wine work to be done (looking at Direct* and other M$ stuff) falls under the unpleasant column (ie, most people won't do this for fun), discouraging commercial work doesn't seem to be the way to go.
I had fun working on DirectDraw, DirectSound and DirectInput.
Ciao, Marcus
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Alexandre Julliard -
Dimitrie O. Paun -
Marcus Meissner -
Nerijus Baliunas -
Roger Fujii