Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches

[Alexandre Julliard]

Patrik Stridvall <ps at leissner.se> writes:

> 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.

There is no difference whatsoever, as long as it is not based on Wine
code. We can't (and shouldn't) prevent anybody from reimplementing a
dll from scratch. What we can (and should IMO) prevent is people using
our own code against us.

> 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.

I think you are very mistaken here. The protection is based strictly
on copyright law, and if anything is certain it is that copyright law
is going to become even stronger in the coming years.

In addition our situation is even easier since the dll interfaces are
already defined for us; the difficulties you see are purely imaginary,
I don't think there would be any technical problem applying the LGPL
to Wine.

The GPL is another story, but we clearly don't want to go there if
Wine is to remain useful for running proprietary applications.

> 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. :-)

If you don't understand the fundamental difference between the GPL and
a standard EULA, I'd suggest studying the issue a bit more.  And
www.gnu.org is probably a better reference than Slashdot to learn
about this kind of things <g>

> 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.

In short, because you don't care about games Wine doesn't have to
support them. I strongly disagree with this sentiment; even though I
don't care much about games myself, I want Wine to be able to run them
just like other applications. And again, DirectX is just one example
of something that could happen with any other part of Wine.

> 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 don't think so; they would certainly have had to make some
adjustments to the business model, but I think it is definitely
possible to build a business on an LGPL code base. Of course these
days building any kind of business is quite difficult, but I don't
think LGPL vs. X11 is going to be the difference that makes otherwise
successful businesses fail.

> 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".

Well, I strongly disagree. Wine is supposed to be a free
implementation of Windows; if making it successful requires making it
non-free, we might as well stop right now.

Anyway we are not going to convince each other. I take note that you
are opposed to the change, even if I admit I'm a bit surprised; it
seems last time we discussed licenses you were quite favorable to the
LGPL.

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
julliard at winehq.com