Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches

[Patrik Stridvall]

> Patrik Stridvall <ps at leissner.se> writes:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I think you greatly underestimate the power of such licenses. 

That is what remains to be seem. Many laws doesn't make logical
sense anymore or becomes inconsistant in the new brave world and
the attempts to adapt them often introduces new problems.

The attempts of various courts the interpret the uninterpretable
inconsistancies, without realizing it, futuremore adds to the confusion.

Expect extreme uncertainty to be the keyword for the immediate future.

> AFAIK
> nobody in the world is currently shipping code (except maybe by
> mistake) in violation of the GPL or LGPL, despite the fact that it has
> never been taken to court. 

True, it does have some power because few wants to be
named a bad boy, but that might mean less and less in the future.

> And nobody in their right mind would base a
> business on shipping illegal code; even if they believed they could
> get a judge to agree with them, the risk is simply too great.

Small changes in a particular DLL then there is no clear boundaries between
their boundaries between their code and ours might be risky, true.

However, in your example five companies offered one proprietary version
each of five different half important DLLs.

They might even have an implementation from scratch with no Wine code at
all.
I can see no difference between for example their DLL and a Microsoft DLL
running under Wine, regardless of Wine being GPL or LGPL or whatever.

Then we have the middle case by have say the Crypto API that is
a part of ADVAPI32. Does distributing a whole file replacement of 
dlls/advapi32/crypt.c represent a violation of GPL or LGPL?
In that case why? The Crypto API is largely independent of the
rest of ADVAPI32 it could as well be a separate DLL.

Any protection that (L)GPL provides is to a large part based on
myth and legend.

In addition hypocritical people at for example Slashdot also 
seems to wish to apply different standard at open source licenses
and proprietary licenses.

So company cries that their products shouldn't be hacked (having a
part replace) should be ignored despite their insistance that a
paragraf of their license has been violated, while any violations
of the (L)GPL doing essentialy the same thing (replacing a part)
should be strictly enforced. :-)

Note that I'm not accusing you of being hypocritical, I just
point out the we can't both have the cake and eat it.
What if Microsoft licensed their code as is not allowed to
run under an emulator or something similar?

Of course myth and legend can be a powerful ally. Just look
at all thing done, good or bad, in the name of Christianity,
Democracy or whatever, regardless of whether what was done was
was logically consistant with whatever else was done.

However, my opposition to (L)GPL is not based primarily on that,
but rather the alleged, and by you, it seems, supported, features
of it. See below.
 
> > > 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.
> 
> I'm not trying to rush anything, just opening a discussion. And as I
> said this is not against Transgaming, any license change would not
> modify the current situation at all anyway, since it obviously only
> applies to future developments.

Agreed.
 
> > > even if I don't entirely agree with his methods.
> > 
> > Well, money makes the world go round whether you like it or not. :-)
> 
> I like it, in fact as you may know I make money with Wine too... I'd
> be more than happy to see Gav or others make millions out of Wine, but
> I don't want to let people hurt the project, even if doing that makes
> them more money.

Agreed.
 
> > 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.
> 
> The issue is absolutely not limited to this InstallShield stuff. In
> fact my worry is much more about what we see happening in DirectX,
> where all development on the free version has stopped.

True, but that doesn't worry me so much, since very few non games
depend of DirectX and this allows us concentrate on what is really
important getting commonly used productivity applications to run
under Wine.

Once companies are being to migrate to Linux/Wine we will hopefully
get an influx of new developers to fix less important problems.
 
> > The work of companies that we don't trust is ignored and we work
> > on as we always have.
> 
> That's true if that work is kept completely proprietary. But the thing
> that the Transgaming stuff should make us realize is that if that work
> is released under a free but non open-source license, it competes with
> Wine for user and developer mind share, and it hurts Wine no matter
> how much we try to ignore it. That is a new situation that I believe
> we didn't take into account when picking the current license.

That is true, but I still think we made the right choice.
If we had made Wine LGPL we might have prevent Transgaming
from entering the market and a change now might prevent others
from doing so.

I think it is very dangerous for us to reject the help we can get
to increase the mind share of Wine and derivates as a whole,
inspite of any inconviences for the core Wine project.

Wine has not yet accieved the breakthrough on the desktop market
that Linux did on the server market and until then we need all the
allies we can yet, regardless of their actually "loyalties".

In short:
We have to take the good with the bad.