Patrik,
The more I read your posts, the less I understand what you are trying to say. You argued over many hundreds of lines over weird technical details and various dubious assumptions about what courts will do in the future.
The main point is that what is legal allow is very unclear. I'm not primarily trying to explain what is legal allowed or not, just pointing out some difficulities in understand what the law really means.
Stop for a movement and tell me: are you against the letter or the spirit of the LGPL.
Asking that question is like asking whether I support the spirit of Communism: "From each according to his abilities - to each according to his needs."
Well, it sound nice doesn't it? However doing a little deeper analysis I realize that the price for being able to do this is not worth paying.
Note however that I'm not equating GPL or LGPL with Communism. It was just an example from real life, that you get more that you wish for. See below.
The spirit is simple:
Here is this thing, we give it to you for free, use it for your own benefit however you see fit. But it's a labor of love, and many people put thousands and thousand of hours in it, together with their hearts and souls. As such, they hold it dear, and they want it to survive, and thrive. All we ask is: if you've made _small_ improvements to it, to make it useful to your purpose, please contribute those back such that our baby can grow and develop together with your business.
I'm against the fact that the GPL or to a smaller extent LGPL tries use the doctrine of derived work as a weapon to achieve their goals. It is a very dangerous weapon, since if the courts or the policitians decide that a strong doctrine of derived work is good it might be disasterous for society as a whole.
Various commerical intrest might (read: will) for example try to use this to stop 3rd party additions to their works and I don't want that to happend.
In short: Be careful what you wish for: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions"
Note that I said "_small_ improvements" because of the modular nature of Wine. If the improvements are big, the DLL separation would allow them to keep those changes proprietary.
I don't think small improvements is a problem anyway and beginning an implementation of say DCOM is probaly not a small improvement and DirectX certainly isn't.
I fail to see _any_ moral/ethical/philosophical problem with this. Do you?
Perhaps you have been more enlightend now.
Patrik Stridvall wrote:
Patrik,
The more I read your posts, the less I understand what you are trying to say. You argued over many hundreds of lines over weird technical details and various dubious assumptions about what courts will do in the future.
The main point is that what is legal allow is very unclear.
Hogwash. I feel the LGPL is extremely clear. It allows you to dynamically link to LGPL code without worries. Full stop.
Patrik, it might be good for you to create a web page outlining the problems you see in the LPGL; that would give you a chance to explain them more clearly than is possible in this forum. Do try to be succinct. I'd like to understand your point of view.
- Dan
The main point is that what is legal allow is very unclear.
Hogwash. I feel the LGPL is extremely clear. It allows you to dynamically link to LGPL code without worries. Full stop.
You want to see a really clear license and short one? look at MS shared-source license. Only 1 page and written in very simple language.
At my previous job we thought about releasing the code for our product, so we gave the company's lawyers the GPL documents. They went through it for few days and their conclusion that the GPL is very complicated, sometimes contradicted and got few holes in it.
Just my $0.02 cents
On 2001.12.18 05:09 Patrik Stridvall wrote: [snip]
Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
Stop for a movement and tell me: are you against the letter or the spirit of the LGPL.
Asking that question is like asking whether I support the spirit of Communism: "From each according to his abilities - to each according to his needs."
Well, it sound nice doesn't it? However doing a little deeper analysis I realize that the price for being able to do this is not worth paying.
Note however that I'm not equating GPL or LGPL with Communism. It was just an example from real life, that you get more that you wish for. See below.
[snip]
That's a piss poor example. The statement that something would be from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs sounds to me at first glance like it would suck. And you don't have to dig too deeply to figure out why that would suck. But maybe that's because I am an American capitalist though and through and that blatantly conflicts with my core values that everyone should do for themselves. And to get off topic, why is that? Because that's what everybody will do anyway, might as well work with that rather than pretend that it is otherwise.
This has lead me to another thought. We cannot pretend that people are going to release code back to Wine under the X11 license. However we can realize the obviousness of the truth that given the chance people will take whatever they can and give back nothing in return. Some folks will give back because it may make more sense to do so than to not. But some folks will be more than happy to take the whole codebase for their own good and provide nothing in return.
We need to stop living in the dream world that everyone who uses Wine will contribute back. Yes, it is true that Corel, Codeweavers, TransGaming, etc. have given a lot to Wine. None of them was or is required to give anything.
If the goal is to let people know that if they want to use Wine then they need to contribute back, then the only choice is to put that into the license. By "use" I am obviously not referring to simply porting an application using Winelib. I am referring to incorporating source code from wine into their own products.
This is exactly what the LGPL was meant to address.
I recall Uwe's usual .sig which is: Free Software: if you contribute nothing, expect nothing.
Maybe we should have one for wine: Wine: If you contribute nothing, well, there isn't shit we can do about it since we are X11 licensed.
-Dave
On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
Note that I said "_small_ improvements" because of the modular nature of Wine. If the improvements are big, the DLL separation would allow them to keep those changes proprietary.
I don't think small improvements is a problem anyway and beginning an implementation of say DCOM is probaly not a small improvement and DirectX certainly isn't.
But if it's not, it's within a small constant factor to replace the rest with prorietary code and not release anything. See, if the DLL is mostly implemented, the changes are not that big, so they should be contributed back. If the DLL is mostly stubs, just rewrite the entire thing, you're not wasting that much effort in the first place, and you can choose whatever licence you want. DirectX and DCOM fall in this cathegory.
I fail to see _any_ moral/ethical/philosophical problem with this. Do you?
Perhaps you have been more enlightend now.
Focusing on obscure issues only is anything but enlightening. :)
-- Dimi.
On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
I'm against the fact that the GPL or to a smaller extent LGPL tries use the doctrine of derived work as a weapon to achieve their goals. It is a very dangerous weapon, since if the courts or the policitians decide that a strong doctrine of derived work is good it might be disasterous for society as a whole.
This is a very good point which in fact _promotes_ the LGPL. Let me explain.
There are two possibilities for copyright law:
1. The copyright law becomes stronger. 2. The copyright law becomes weaker.
I will assume, for the purpose of this discussion, that:
A. Wine contributors wish for 2. I, for one, am very worried about the direction of law these days (see: software patents, DCMA, SSSCA, etc.) and I fully agree with Gerard that it's an unfortunate situation B. There doesn't seem to be any negative feedback loop that will prevent 2 from happening. That is, it is very probable that 2 _will_ happen sooner rather than later.
Now, let's just go through the possibilities:
Let's look at copyright law. If our dreams come true and 2. will become reality, then Wine will be in no worse situation than it is now in. The LGPL will effectively become BSD, i./ii. become irrelevant, and we're all happy. This scenario is possible, but (unfortunately) not probable.
On the other hand, if society moves towards 1., then the LGPL is the perfect tool because it turns the stronger copyright law against itself. In this case, it is the only moral/ethical thing to do: to turn an evil instrument against itself, thus provides the _negative_feedback_loop_ that is missing at the moment.
Moreover, if you are worried about the fact that open source software is so influential that it can influence the debate over the doctrine of derived work, then even more so should we opt for the LGPL because in that case we would contribute to a negative feedback that will deter politicians from making the copyright law arbitrarily stronger.
-- Dimi.
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Dan Kegel -
David Elliott -
Dimitrie O. Paun -
Hetz Ben Hamo -
Patrik Stridvall