Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches

[Dimitrie O. Paun]

On Thu, Dec 13, 2001 at 07:47:42PM -0800, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> [snip] 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?

Well, a few years ago we discussed this very topic, and at the time I
supported a change to LGPL. I still do, because I think it will hellp
Wine, for the following reasons:
 -- we greatly increase our potential code-sharing base. Not only we can
copy code from more places (X11-licenced places are still available), but
we can now theoretically use any LGPL libs which were before off-limits.
 -- we greatly increase our developer pool. This is a critical point. The
project has been around for a long time, but it has failed to atract a
large number of developers. Even today, there are just a few (say in the
order of 10) active developers. Of this, I doubt we'll lose any if we
switch to LGPL. However, the upside is big. A few years back, Ingo Molnar
(or Linux Kernel fame), wrote to the wine-devel list saying that he really
wanted to contribute the project but didn't because of the lack of
protection of his work from the licence. I'm sure anyone who knows even a
little bit of Ingo's work would_love_ to have such a talented guy
contribute to Wine. Moreover, we have to understand that the Open Source
community has grown quite large lately, but that means that for most
people Open Source == (L)GPL. It takes a few levels of refinement to
understand _why_ one would like to licence under an X11-style licence. It
is, after all, a natural reaction. I know it took me a _long_ time to
understand that. There's no point in swiming against the current.
 -- the two points mentioned earlier will improve the speed of the
development, and that can only be good. History shows us that
_availability_ is what wins. It would be to everyone's advantage (even
companies using Wine's code), to have *working* code, even if under a
stricter licence such as LGPL. It would make it much easier to reimplement
that feature under a different licence, than no code.
 -- nowadays Wine is nicely modularized along clear DLL boundaries, which
also bounds the 'infectious' nature of the LGPL. Again, think about
availabily, If a DLL is 80% X11-licenced, and 20% LGPLed, it would be far
easier for anyone to replace the 20% with propriatery/X11-licenced code,
than to start from a non-working DLL.
 -- on the political front, the LGPL provides a lot more _stability_ than
a X11-style licence one. And stability, in the long term, helps
everybody: comercial companies, because it removes a lot of the risk, Wine
in terms for developer peace of mind.


In other words, I fully support such a change. The upside looks great, as
I've just tried to show. Let's consider the downside: we might lose some
developers. I claim this is not gonna be the case, but we can have an
informal poll: let's see a show of hands for the people who will stop
contributing to Wine if we switch over to LGPL.

--
Dimi.