Gentlemen,
I do not wish to interrupt the nice email party going on here, but I wish to bring an example in real life which might let people re-think their decision....
I'll try to be a simple as I can. The following case is totally fiction.
For the sake of this email, lets say I'm a lead developer in a company caled qwerty-wine, and one of my customers want me to develop a software for his palm top tun Visio XP on it, for the field engineers. For the sake of this example, lets say I'm checking out wine cvs today.
Now - lets say that now is May, Codeweavers had decided to switch to LGPL and lets say that I am their competitor and I just had become aware of a DLL which is not implemented, but it is (according to a co- developer) implemented in Wine under the LGPL tree, so it means I'm 2 "cvs" commands from getting their implementation...
Now - what if my product is totally a closed source one and my client doesn't want to reveal a single source code line? then I have 2 choices regarding this DLL:
1. I can Ignore the DLL in the Wine tree and re-implement it from where it was before the license has been changed and I keep the changes since it already implemented in Wine tree (and my customer doesn't want to reveal code).
2. I can "steal" this code from the new LGPL wine tree, and saving myself 90% of headache how to implement it, and invest 10% of the time to change the code cosmetically to look different, so if CodeWeaver's wine DLL looked like:
1+2+3+4=10
Then my code will look like:
5+5=10
So the code is different, but it does same thing, and I still keep my code closed...
Who's loosing here? CodeWeavers. I used their code and no one got nothing out of this. Nada. Zilch. Zero. All their investment on that DLL implementation went down, they'll have hard time to re-cap this investment.
Lets say that CodeWeavers could drag me to court and I'll be happy to show the code to the Judge or any 3rd party mediator - what he'll see? he'll see completly 2 different implementations which give same results. I win the case and I can collect damages from CodeWeavers.
I repeat again - all the above is a FICTION. I'm not a developer (I'm unemployed at the moment) and the whole case - I made it up (although I heard some people were interested to see Wine on Embedded). But you wouldn't know if your competitor will use this trick with your code, will you? TransGaming probably won't do it, but others?
So yes, CodeWeaver have their full right to move their code to LGPL or whatever. Is it a smart move for the Wine development move? yes. Is it a smart move business wide? IMHO - no, but CodeWeavers is a private company, and it's Jeremy full right to decide what to do with their code.
I support CodeWeavers (bought their crossover even if I used it for 2 days), Transgaming (I subscribed, even if their code doesn't make my games work yet), and Lindows (I'll keep my Redhat and multi user approach, thank you!) and I plan to continue to do so - but will CodeWeaver exists due to this move? for a long term - I'm not sure, although I surely hope to be wrong here..
Just food for thought...
Hetz Ben Hamo
Hetz Ben-Hamo wrote:
Now - what if my product is totally a closed source one and my client doesn't want to reveal a single source code line? then I have 2 choices regarding this DLL:
Then it's a bad decision to use xGPL licensed source base. You should be able to explain to your customer that he can try develop this whole thing on his own, which would cost him Millions, or the alternative is that to use a xGPL based code, which will save him Millions and he just has to pay for the little part he really needs added. The advantage of that saving is bigger than keeping that bit of code to your self I'd say and this is only fair to the developers who gave their time (which also costs money) and give something back. Anything else is stealing.
Sombody who want's to take the advantages of open sourced code should consider that everybody benfefits. If nobody would have decided to do that open source thing then he could pay and pay and pay for everything.
1+2+3+4=10
Then my code will look like:
5+5=10
So the code is different, but it does same thing, and I still keep my code closed...
Who's loosing here? CodeWeavers. I used their code and no one got nothing out of this. Nada. Zilch. Zero. All their investment on that DLL implementation went down, they'll have hard time to re-cap this investment.
That's stealing. Just because it is easier then stealing an expensive car doesn't mean that it is less illegal. And if somebody makes that public your company is quite in trouble. The open source mind is also based on trust and on the believe that everybody will gain in the end. After all you also incorporate and use the things others may have payed for on the same principle and could have kept for themself. If everybody is stealing only then this is the death of OS.
Lets say that CodeWeavers could drag me to court and I'll be happy to show the code to the Judge or any 3rd party mediator - what he'll see? he'll see completly 2 different implementations which give same results. I win the case and I can collect damages from CodeWeavers.
Not really. Depends on the guys who have to judge the code. And if the code is only cosmetically changed then this is quite obvious to see unless you put in quite some effort to hide it.
Your argument is also not really specific to Wine, because this is a szenario for EVERY OS code that exists.
So yes, CodeWeaver have their full right to move their code to LGPL or whatever. Is it a smart move for the Wine development move? yes. Is it a smart move business wide? IMHO - no, but CodeWeavers is a private company, and it's Jeremy full right to decide what to do with their code.
It is just as smart as for other OS projects.
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********
On 2/16/2002 at 12:04 PM Gerhard W. Gruber wrote:
Hetz Ben-Hamo wrote:
[snip]
1+2+3+4=10
Then my code will look like:
5+5=10
So the code is different, but it does same thing, and I still keep my code closed...
Who's loosing here? CodeWeavers. I used their code and no one got nothing out of this. Nada. Zilch. Zero. All their investment on that DLL implementation went down, they'll have hard time to re-cap this investment.
That's stealing. Just because it is easier then stealing an expensive car doesn't mean that it is less illegal. And if somebody makes that public your company is quite in trouble. The open source mind is also based on trust and on the believe that everybody will gain in the end. After all you also incorporate and use the things others may have payed for on the same principle and could have kept for themself. If everybody is stealing only then this is the death of OS.
Unethical, maybe, but isn't that what WINE is essentially doing, without looking at the code, though? Illegal, definately not. Copyrigt only protects the expression of the idea, not the idea itself. Let's not start on patents, though :->
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Gerhard W. Gruber -
Hetz Ben-Hamo -
Nick Temple