Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches

[David Elliott]

On 2001.12.13 18:43 Patrik Stridvall wrote:
> > 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.
> 

Patrick, is your glass always half-empty?  There is no need to be 
completely and totally pessimistic about everything.  Just look at the 
archives.  Almost every argument you have ever made on this list begins 
with some statement about the courts being stupid or corrupt or 
something.  Really dude, lay off the slashdot for a while.

With that said I'd also like to apologize for saying that (but it still 
needed to be said).

Alexandre is correct that you are greatly underestimating the power of the 
FSF licenses.  Remember, the GPL and LGPL and also the X11, BSD, etc. all 
give you rights that by law you would not have.

> > 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.
> 
You are deluded if you think companies who have been in this position were 
only concerned about PR.  Companies are concerned about only one thing: 
money.  Any company that is not conerned about money as priority number 1 
is broken.  Hell, by law they have to be.

The bottom line is that someone decided that the cost of bringing their 
product into compliance with the (L)GPL one way or another was less than 
the cost of the alternatives.

> > 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.
> 
Yeah, you're absolutely correct.  If a company wants to from scratch 
implement a DLL and sell it then they can.  Just don't do it with code 
from Wine. (but see below)

> 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.
> 

Hmm, let me think here about what the LGPL states.  Let's say Advanced 
Crypto Systems (made up company, hereafter refered to as ACS) decides they 
want to write a proprietary implementation of the crypto code in ADVAPI32.

The LGPL specifically states that you may statically link LGPL code and 
proprietary code to form a new library provided you follow the 
conditions.  Basically that means the same as usual, that end-users must 
be able to replace the LGPL part with a newer/modified version given that 
the interface remains the same.  So ACS would be entitled to provide for 
example a libadvapi32.so file that could drop into an existing wine 
installation as long as they also at the very least provided their object 
code before linking it with the rest of wine which would allow an end-user 
to compile a newer version of wine and link in the ACS crypto support.  
ACS could instead provide source code, but it need not be under the 
(L)GPL.  It could be under a license only allowing redistribution to 
people who have a license for the binary.

So basically to answer your question: no, it does not violate the LGPL, 
though it sure as hell would violate the GPL.. But as Alexandre said, the 
GPL is extremely inappropriate for Wine, and as such I recommend we drop 
the GPL issue immediately and focus on LGPL.

> 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. :-)
> 
As Alexandre said in his reply to this message, these are two different 
things.  As noted above, the (L)GPL gives you privileges you don't 
otherwise have.  An EULA takes away rights you should have.  EULAs are 
actually pretty questionable if you think about it.  But copyright on a 
written work is pretty well established.

> 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?
> 
Tough cookies for them.  EULA is really a questionable thing.

> 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.
> 
Where you are going with this I have no idea, but while your at it why not 
mention the people (using the term broadly here) that are doing bad stuff 
in the name of Islam.

> 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.
> 
Right, so your opposition to the LGPL is not based on the first 60% of 
what you said... Why did you bother saying it then.

> > > > 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.
> 
I have to agree with you here Patrick, but for a different reason.  
Basically if transgaming wants to maintain their own version of DirectX 
the LGPL does not stop them from doing it.  This holds true for even parts 
of a DLL (see above discussion using your crypto code example).

> 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.
> 
Bullshit.  The LGPL is actually pretty damn liberal.  I think one 
advantage here is that it would actually require the transgaming peices to 
be in different object files so they could be relinked, or in different 
source files (possibly under the AFPL) so that they can be recompiled and 
then relinked.

> 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.
> 

Sorry, I totally disagree with this.  Wine exists because developers like 
us enjoy hacking on it.  Is the goal really to try to bring as many people 
away from MS Windows regardless of what platform the move to.  What if 
people decide to move away from Windows and to some other proprietary 
WinAPI platform.  Has this really furthered the Wine project?  With the 
risk of sounding too much like Stallman, I think the real goal is to get 
as many people using free software as the base system.  I will stop with 
that because I don't think at this point forcing the issue of free 
software for everything (including applications) is going to work.

In any case, going LGPL would not affect TransGaming horribly.  They would 
still be free to release proprietary components such as the DirectX 
libraries.  And by my reading of the LGPL they would even be able to 
implement parts of a DLL as long as they are in seperate objects.

Furthermore, moving to LGPL is not as bad as moving from the original 
license to X11 was.  As has been mentioned the only thing that needs to be 
done is to make new contributions LGPL.  I will actually extend this 
idea.  Give developers a choice of whether they want to use LGPL or X11 
for their contributions.  The idea being that to use Wine as a whole you 
must comply with the LGPL, but for any existing code and for any new 
contributions under X11 a user or developer could use the code for 
anything.  The only thing that needs to be done to make this happen is for 
Alexandre to start accepting code licensed under the LGPL into the Wine 
tree.

-Dave