On Thu, Dec 13, 2001 at 07:47:42PM -0800, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
[snip] But I see now that there are ways to make the code kind-of-proprietary that can actually cause more harm to Wine than purely proprietary ones, and I think we should do something to address this issue.
What do others think?
Well, a few years ago we discussed this very topic, and at the time I supported a change to LGPL. I still do, because I think it will hellp Wine, for the following reasons: -- we greatly increase our potential code-sharing base. Not only we can copy code from more places (X11-licenced places are still available), but we can now theoretically use any LGPL libs which were before off-limits. -- we greatly increase our developer pool. This is a critical point. The project has been around for a long time, but it has failed to atract a large number of developers. Even today, there are just a few (say in the order of 10) active developers. Of this, I doubt we'll lose any if we switch to LGPL. However, the upside is big. A few years back, Ingo Molnar (or Linux Kernel fame), wrote to the wine-devel list saying that he really wanted to contribute the project but didn't because of the lack of protection of his work from the licence. I'm sure anyone who knows even a little bit of Ingo's work would_love_ to have such a talented guy contribute to Wine. Moreover, we have to understand that the Open Source community has grown quite large lately, but that means that for most people Open Source == (L)GPL. It takes a few levels of refinement to understand _why_ one would like to licence under an X11-style licence. It is, after all, a natural reaction. I know it took me a _long_ time to understand that. There's no point in swiming against the current. -- the two points mentioned earlier will improve the speed of the development, and that can only be good. History shows us that _availability_ is what wins. It would be to everyone's advantage (even companies using Wine's code), to have *working* code, even if under a stricter licence such as LGPL. It would make it much easier to reimplement that feature under a different licence, than no code. -- nowadays Wine is nicely modularized along clear DLL boundaries, which also bounds the 'infectious' nature of the LGPL. Again, think about availabily, If a DLL is 80% X11-licenced, and 20% LGPLed, it would be far easier for anyone to replace the 20% with propriatery/X11-licenced code, than to start from a non-working DLL. -- on the political front, the LGPL provides a lot more _stability_ than a X11-style licence one. And stability, in the long term, helps everybody: comercial companies, because it removes a lot of the risk, Wine in terms for developer peace of mind.
In other words, I fully support such a change. The upside looks great, as I've just tried to show. Let's consider the downside: we might lose some developers. I claim this is not gonna be the case, but we can have an informal poll: let's see a show of hands for the people who will stop contributing to Wine if we switch over to LGPL.
-- Dimi.
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Dimitrie O. Paun