Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches

[John Alvord]

On 13 Dec 2001 19:47:42 -0800, Alexandre Julliard
<julliard at winehq.com> wrote:

>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?

One possible trap to getting toward a GPL. If I remember right, the
last time, you had to get consensus. If "pseudo-open-source" company
had contributed code, you would need their permission and they don't
have to agree.

john