Note that I do not pretend to know how the courts will rule. But I do know that sticking the head in the sand and pretending that (L)GPL doesn't have large potential holes in it is quite naive and potentially dangerous.
Then if the LGPL holes are dangerous, the X11 license should be even more dangerous; after all it's a much larger hole than the LGPL will ever have. I still don't understand where you are trying to go with your argument.
Sure it has a larger hole. But at least it is obvious that is does. It doesn't make you believe good things will happend.
The point is that you seem to wish some things to happend and I point out that LGPL provides not guarentee that it will actually will happend despite that LGPL at a quick glance looks like it in some meaning forces what you wish to happend.
One the other hand the LGPL might scare away potential companies wishing to extend Wine. See below.
No, of course the LGPL doesn't provide absolute protection; nothing does, and I don't think absolute protection is desirable either. There are some things that the LGPL clearly allows, some that it clearly forbids, and a number of border cases, that frankly are only interesting to people who want to try to get around the license restrictions. And what would be the point of doing that?
Making their business model work. Trying to ensure investment return.
If the license is not acceptable to someone, they don't have to use the code. Who would risk bad PR and potential lawsuits just to prove that they can find a loophole in the LGPL?
So we lose some possible companies willing to help in two step. 1. Because they do not dare 2. Because you (or somebody else) sue them
Great idea. NOT.
You really make it sound like the LGPL is some kind of unexplored wilderness that we shouldn't venture into.
We are not a normal software project and thus what really is a derived work when faced with a lot unimplemented stuff are much more difficult to know. I have tried to show that LGPL in itself is pretty weak and are likely to be even weaker then faced with Wine's special circumstances.
The fact is that a large majority of free software projects use either the GPL or the LGPL, and in practice it works just fine for them, just as I'm confident it would work just fine for us.
Normal software project doesn't have any large design with a lot of not yet implemented functions, there it makes sense for some company to say: Hey I could provide an implementation of this special part under this special business model.
Face it we are not a normal software project and the arguments they used for chosing (L)GPL are not really relevant here.
Note that I'm not denying that convincing arguements for choosing LGPL might exists, but reference to earlier success is not one of them. Your argument that LGPL forces good things to happend is not entirely convincing either for reasons stated earlier.
The current license is something that is easy to understand and are unlikely to scare companies like Transgaming away, but can you really say the say same about LGPL?
Patrik Stridvall ps@leissner.se writes:
No, of course the LGPL doesn't provide absolute protection; nothing does, and I don't think absolute protection is desirable either. There are some things that the LGPL clearly allows, some that it clearly forbids, and a number of border cases, that frankly are only interesting to people who want to try to get around the license restrictions. And what would be the point of doing that?
Making their business model work. Trying to ensure investment return.
That would be the case if the code they are using magically turned LGPL once they had invested millions. But that's not possible, since only new code becomes LGPL. Now, if someone is basing his business model on turning LGPL code proprietary by exploiting possible loopholes in the license, I wouldn't suggest investing in his company... I don't think our goal in choosing a license is to make sure every flawed business model can succeed. There are lots of reasonable business models that can be built on a LGPL (or GPL) code base.
The current license is something that is easy to understand and are unlikely to scare companies like Transgaming away, but can you really say the say same about LGPL?
OK, now we are getting somewhere. So your argument is basically that the LGPL might scare some companies away. Yes, I agree that's a possibility. Most likely these companies will have been scared away from Linux already, since many other things they need are also LGPL (most notably the C library). But of course this possibility cannot be excluded.
I think that the risk of this happening is not larger than the risk of having companies hold hostage pieces of Wine, and the damage in the second case is much larger; so I think the LGPL would minimize the potential damage to the project, even if damage cannot be excluded in any situation. Of course only the future can tell us who is right.
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Alexandre Julliard -
Patrik Stridvall