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?
Umm. I feared that question would come. The "protection" the LGPL (or GPL) that Marcus proposed is IMHO largely an illusion when it comes to libraries.
Sure we might use a strict interpretion as a weapon in a PR campaign against possible voilators but we don't have the resources to sue somebody and I very much doubt we would succed either.
If I was I judge I wouldn't want to touch the issue of what constituted "linking" with a ten foot pole. Beside since where was no real damages since Wine was already free I would probably look for an excuse to dismiss the case as early as possible.
No, a license change is not the answer to our problems.
My concern is not so much about Transgaming, I trust that Gav means to do the right thing,
Agreed and I think we should allow them considerable time to consider their position as well no need to rush something.
even if I don't entirely agree with his methods.
Well, money makes the world go round whether you like it or not. :-)
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.
Succeed with what?
Now that Transgaming has done the hard work of getting InstallShield to work and even been kind enough provide the source code eventhough under a propritary license it can't be that difficult to look at it and provide an alternative implementation.
Note that Gav said: < To say that our work is preventing anyone from doing a free version of DCOM is < completely incorrect. To the contrary: we have already contributed < substantial amounts of this code to the public tree - thousands of < lines, in fact. That can only help anyone with a sudden and unexpected < interest in recreating our work.
We could quite easily make InstallShield work ourselves now that they have don't all the tedious debugging and we know what needs to be done. Note copyright only protects expression not fact or ideas (or hard work for that matter).
In light of this it might be advantagous for Transgaming to release their InstallShield code. But as I said lets no rush things. I'm prepared to give them the benifit of the doubt and wait for them to decide.
However my (and presumable others) patience in not boundless.
What will happen if 5 different dlls are improved and released by 5 different companies under 5 different non-free licenses?
When we had to decide which of the companies we trusted to release their code in the not so far away future and which we don't trust.
The work of companies that we don't trust is ignored and we work on as we always have.
Patrik Stridvall ps@leissner.se writes:
Umm. I feared that question would come. The "protection" the LGPL (or GPL) that Marcus proposed is IMHO largely an illusion when it comes to libraries.
Sure we might use a strict interpretion as a weapon in a PR campaign against possible voilators but we don't have the resources to sue somebody and I very much doubt we would succed either.
I think you greatly underestimate the power of such licenses. AFAIK nobody in the world is currently shipping code (except maybe by mistake) in violation of the GPL or LGPL, despite the fact that it has never been taken to court. And nobody in their right mind would base a business on shipping illegal code; even if they believed they could get a judge to agree with them, the risk is simply too great.
My concern is not so much about Transgaming, I trust that Gav means to do the right thing,
Agreed and I think we should allow them considerable time to consider their position as well no need to rush something.
I'm not trying to rush anything, just opening a discussion. And as I said this is not against Transgaming, any license change would not modify the current situation at all anyway, since it obviously only applies to future developments.
even if I don't entirely agree with his methods.
Well, money makes the world go round whether you like it or not. :-)
I like it, in fact as you may know I make money with Wine too... I'd be more than happy to see Gav or others make millions out of Wine, but I don't want to let people hurt the project, even if doing that makes them more money.
Now that Transgaming has done the hard work of getting InstallShield to work and even been kind enough provide the source code eventhough under a propritary license it can't be that difficult to look at it and provide an alternative implementation.
The issue is absolutely not limited to this InstallShield stuff. In fact my worry is much more about what we see happening in DirectX, where all development on the free version has stopped.
The work of companies that we don't trust is ignored and we work on as we always have.
That's true if that work is kept completely proprietary. But the thing that the Transgaming stuff should make us realize is that if that work is released under a free but non open-source license, it competes with Wine for user and developer mind share, and it hurts Wine no matter how much we try to ignore it. That is a new situation that I believe we didn't take into account when picking the current license.
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Alexandre Julliard -
Patrik Stridvall