Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches

[Alexandre Julliard]

Gerard Patel <gerard.patel at nerim.net> writes:

> I believe that in your approach (I mean here you, Alexandre Julliard),
> as in the case of the developers I quoted, I have not heard much 
> about users rights.

I think that's quite unfair. I have stated that I personally don't
care about games, I don't have a single application that even uses
DirectX. The only reason I think DirectX is an issue is because I see
users complaining that Wine doesn't run their favorite game, and I
want Wine to be useful for as many people as possible.

> If you cared that much for users, as  is implied by the Gpl license,
> the work made by Codeweavers for Borland would be repellent :
> yes, the code (all of it ?) has been released to Wine. But Kylix
> users don't have the  possibility to get the Wine source code 
> used; they don't have the right to get latest Wine code and 
> maybe fix bugs.
> This is scandalous from a  Gpl point of view, yet no Wine 
> developer has ever said anything against it.

Maybe not in public, but I can assure you that a lot has been going on
behind the scenes; otherwise you probably wouldn't have seen a single
line of code going back to Wine. And I would have *loved* for Wine to
be LGPL back then, it would have saved us all a lot of trouble. In
fact that's when I started to realize that there was a problem with
the current license.

> I'm sorry but this sounds rather selfish. You have entirely the right
> to be selfish about your (enormous) work of course, but a proprietary
> license is more logical in this case. 
> You want to use the Gpl as a tool, but I don't see a lot of respect 
> for the philosophy that is behind it. 

I must say I'm quite offended by your comments. The only reason I
raise the issue is because I want Wine to remain as useful as possible
for everybody. 

I don't think this is the place for debating the FSF philosophy, it is
a religious issue and you are probably not going to get two people to
agree on it; that doesn't mean we cannot all agree to use the LGPL,
even if each person agrees for slightly different reasons.

I can assure you that personally I agree a lot more with the FSF ideas
than you seem to think; I'd be happy to discuss this with you but
wine-devel is probably not the right place for that.

> What I find even more disturbing in what you said is the allusion
> (when replying to Patrick) to a future tightening of copyright laws,
> a tendency that is in my opinion directly linked to the idea of 
> copyright, patents, etc being 'intellectual property' assets,
> and infringers thieves stealing them. You seemed to welcome
> the additional protection it would give Wine.

Absolutely not, and I don't know how you got this impression. I'd love
for copyright law to get back to sanity, but I don't see this
happening in the near future. Yes, there are a lot of abuses done in
the name of intellectual property these days. Does this mean we have
to let people hurt us and do nothing? You seem to think that users
rights are important, but how are you going to defend their rights if
not by using the only tool that we have, namely copyright law?

Yes, users would probably be better off if copyright didn't exist. But
that's not the world we leave in unfortunately.

> What I hear is : more Dmitry Sklyarovs. More programmers in jail.
> Is this what you want  ? Are you really so eager to send legal 
> injunctions to people ? No one should think that in a legal action
> the programmers doing the actual work will be left alone and the
> 'suits' will go to jail. This is not how this world works (not that I 
> think that the 'suits' deserve it anyway)

I'm not planning to send anybody to jail, and I find that suggestion
insulting. 

> 2) You seem to think that Transgaming or similar companies are or
> could be responsible for the low Wine mindshare among developers
> I don't think this is explaining even 1% of the problem. 
> There are much more bigger reasons for Wine not attracting 
> and - more importantly - not keeping developers.
> I don't think this particular discussion is important now, though.

I'd be happy to hear what you think the reasons are, but we can
discuss this privately. And no, I don't think Transgaming is
responsible for the lack of developers; I do think that given the lack
of developers, discouraging even a few of the existing ones can cause
a lot of harm to the project.

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
julliard at winehq.com