Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches

[Alexandre Julliard]

David Elliott <dfe at tgwbd.org> writes:

> Umm, do I sense a little Deja Vu here.  IIRC Wine's original license
> had some issues that meant it wasn't GPL compatible.  The new license,
> which I understand is a modified BSD or an X11 license, basically says
> do whatever you want with it.

The original license was pretty much the same way except for
technicalities.

> This is so true.  Of course now that the cat is out of the bag maybe a
> more pertinent question is what happens if we make new code LGPL or
> some such?  Do we still have companies using Wine code but using the
> older versions under the X11 license?  Then we'd really have a mess.

Not really; people using Wine and who don't want to switch to the new
license would simply have to avoid merging in new code. Note that if
we go LGPL, each dll would be considered a separate library, so
companies could choose which ones they want to merge. For instance
Transgaming could freely merge into their tree any new code that
doesn't touch the DirectX dlls; of course they would then have to
release the dlls they merged under the LGPL, but they could still keep
the DirectX ones proprietary.

The license change would only take full effect in the long term, when
the current versions of Wine are too obsolete to be a reasonable
option for someone starting a new project.

> [...]  Do we really want to send the message that in order
> to use the wine code your program must be free software?

This would be the message if we were to use the GPL, which I think we
all agree would not be really possible if we still want to be able to
run proprietary applications. With the LGPL the message would be that
you can use the code pretty much as you want, but if you change it you
have to release the changes.

> I cannot come up with a reasonable choice here.  Either way has
> drawbacks.  We've been through this before and went with the X11
> license.  Maybe it's time to rethink that decision... maybe not.  All
> I can say is that I for one would like to know how current developers
> stand on this issue.  Has anyone's thoughts/opinions changed
> significantly?

Mine at least yes... I used to think that proprietary versions of Wine
wouldn't matter, since we already have to compete against the ultimate
proprietary Wine (the one from Redmond). 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?

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
julliard at winehq.com