Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches

[Patrik Stridvall]

> Patrik Stridvall <ps at leissner.se> writes:
> 
> > In short:
> > Should the Wine project wait until you release or should it not?
> 
> That's certainly a question we have to think about, but I think there
> is a deeper issue: should we continue to release under a license that
> allows people to use our own code to hurt the project?

Umm. I feared that question would come. The "protection" the LGPL (or GPL)
that Marcus proposed is IMHO largely an illusion when it comes to libraries.

Sure we might use a strict interpretion as a weapon in a PR campaign
against possible voilators but we don't have the resources to sue
somebody and I very much doubt we would succed either.

If I was I judge I wouldn't want to touch the issue of what constituted
"linking" with a ten foot pole. Beside since where was no real damages
since Wine was already free I would probably look for an excuse to
dismiss the case as early as possible.

No, a license change is not the answer to our problems. 

> My concern is not so much about Transgaming, I trust that Gav means to
> do the right thing, 

Agreed and I think we should allow them considerable time to consider
their position as well no need to rush something.

> even if I don't entirely agree with his methods.

Well, money makes the world go round whether you like it or not. :-)

> But I'm worried that if Transgaming succeeds, it will set a precedent
> that others will follow, who may have no desire at all to do the right
> thing for Wine. 

Succeed with what? 

Now that Transgaming has done the hard work of getting InstallShield to 
work and even been kind enough provide the source code eventhough under
a propritary license it can't be that difficult to look at it and
provide an alternative implementation.

Note that Gav said:
< To say that our work is preventing anyone from doing a free version of
DCOM is
< completely incorrect.  To the contrary: we have already contributed
< substantial amounts of this code to the public tree - thousands of
< lines, in fact.  That can only help anyone with a sudden and unexpected 
< interest in recreating our work.

We could quite easily make InstallShield work ourselves now that they
have don't all the tedious debugging and we know what needs to be done.
Note copyright only protects expression not fact or ideas (or hard work
for that matter).

In light of this it might be advantagous for Transgaming to release their
InstallShield code. But as I said lets no rush things. I'm prepared
to give them the benifit of the doubt and wait for them to decide.

However my (and presumable others) patience in not boundless.

> What will happen if 5 different dlls are improved and
> released by 5 different companies under 5 different non-free licenses?

When we had to decide which of the companies we trusted to release their
code in the not so far away future and which we don't trust.

The work of companies that we don't trust is ignored and we work
on as we always have.