Technicalities aside, the LGPL spirit seems to be accepted by most people. We've heard no end of discussion of what represents the code, and so on, but in reality (please Patrik :)), Wine is a _well_defined_ piece of software. In fact, it's defined by Microsoft, and well accepted by the world at large.
Now, that being said, there seems to be two camps: -- the BSD camp, which maintains that BSD is good enough, and that people will in fact do what the LGPL wants.
-- the LGPL camp, which says 'well, if that's the case, why not have it formalized in the license'?
No, I think you misunderstand. I'm not in the BSD camp as you define it. I do not nessarily believe that everybody will follow what the LGPL wants or at least that they will do things that they are certain would have been allowed if it was LGPL. And that is an important part of my objection: It makes it less clear what is allowed.
Before I go any further, I would like to stress a very important point: Wine is in fact a collection of independent projects. These are the DLLs, and they nicely (and unequivocally) partition Wine into lovely little, independent components. And this means that the LGPL is independently contained to each and every DLL. It is the _perfect_ position to be LGPLed.
You forget that some "independent"(*) parts like the Crypto API are parts of other DLL:s (like ADVAPI32.DLL) for no particular reason.
Actually large parts of the Windows API are "independent"(*). They are just helper function wrappers around other functions.
(*) By "independent" mean that they just use other parts of the Windows API like normal applications do and claiming derived work for this would be absurd, just like claiming it for normal applications would be absurd.
At this point, I would like to know if people agree up to this point.
I don't.
The discussion has been going all over the place, so I would like to keep this email short and to the point: 0. Isn't Wine's best interest to evolve and develop as fast as it can?
Yes.
- If so, isn't the LGPL _spirit_ in Wine's best interest?
No, not nessararily. See different mail.
- If so, why shouldn't we formalize it in the license?
But it isn't nessarily so.
When answering these questions, let's try to leave the commercial aspect out of it for a second. That is a separate discussion. You see, the reason we care about the commercial aspect is that we hope (from Wine's selfish point of view -- as it should be!), that the commercial world will actually _help_ in the development of Wine (that is, having a commercial universe around Wine would be in Wine's best interest). Now, I claim that the LGPL is _way_better_ for the commercial interests in the long term, but I will leave that to a future email (if people care to discuss it).
Claiming that it is better for Wine as a whole is one thing, but claiming that limiting commercial intrests choices is good even for them, requires a explaination.
On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
You forget that some "independent"(*) parts like the Crypto API are parts of other DLL:s (like ADVAPI32.DLL) for no particular reason.
This is ridiculous: it is one of the few exceptions, it is simply silly to bring the Crypto API into this discussion. If this the Crypto API is the only problem, we can fix it in multiple ways.
At this point, I would like to know if people agree up to this point.
I don't.
That's informative. WHAT don't you agree with? In fact, if we can agree on WHAT we disagree, I think it would be a great step forward.
- Isn't Wine's best interest to evolve and develop as fast
as it can?
Yes.
This is a fundamental point. A project like Wine is just like a living, breathing creature. And being need to be selfish to survive. Not too selfish, but it is essential that they have a certain level of selfishness. In Wine's case, that has to be: 'the licence should be such that it would maximize Wine's development'.
- If so, isn't the LGPL _spirit_ in Wine's best interest?
No, not nessararily. See different mail.
1 follows from 0. Period. You can not agree with 0 and disagree with 1, no matter what you write in other emails! :) Again, THE SPIRIT of LGPL, not the letter. Again, the spirit is: 'if you improve Wine in minor ways, please contribute back your improvements'.
- If so, why shouldn't we formalize it in the license?
But it isn't nessarily so.
And why is that? Quite the contrary, because:
-- For people that contribute back, would chnage nothing -- For people that don't contribute their changes, it's no good to us, so we don't care (which follows by point 0).
Tertium non datur. That is, there's no other case. QED.
-- Dimi.
-
Dimitrie O. Paun -
Patrik Stridvall