On Mon, 17 Dec 2001, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
This has been my argument against Patrick exactly. Some protection is better than none at all.
As a general rule, yes.
However this time the protection comes with a price.
And what might that price be? You fear that we are going to alienate the commercial ventures developed around Wine?
Yes.
The problem is not whether LGPL is well written or not the problem it is the doctrine of derived work. That is very unclear because of lack of good case law.
Oh, come on, for crying out loud! The LGPL is the best thing we have -- we can't wait for a good case law to adopt a license. Yes, there may be problems, but that's life. We take our best shot -- this is what we're doing with Wine in the first place!
The main problem is that using the LGPL introduces uncertainty to what is allowed and that advantages is not good enough IMHO to outweight the disadvantages.
Patrik, your entire arguments are based on such obscure assumptions that's scary! I must tell you, both the GPL and LGPL have received careful scrutiny from FSF's legal council (and a bunch of other law professors, I'm sure).
The problem is the doctrine of derived works. Nothing else. Even if their understand of other parts of law are perfect it matters not.
IIRC their arguments always seen to assume that the doctrine of derived works is unproblematic if applied to source code.
It's the best we can hope for now. You come along with a bunch of 'it is possible' type of scenarios (doh, everything is possible!), and say that 'well, everything's in vain, we're doomed, there's no point in doing anything, actually...'. In all honesty, it just looks stinks. Badly.
To connect again to the example of the spirit of Communism: I am sure it was very popular to dismiss to fear of the opponents by saying what you have been saying. Trivialising the problems and clinging to clean, pure and uncomplicated spirit of it.
On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
The problem is the doctrine of derived works. Nothing else.
And to you truly believe that our choice for Wine's license will have any influence over the doctrine of derived works? If not, there really is no point in discussing this any further. If yes, than even more so should we chose the LGPL, as it will help settle the debate the right way.
-- Dimi.
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Dimitrie O. Paun -
Patrik Stridvall