Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches

[Alexandre Julliard]

Patrik Stridvall <ps at leissner.se> writes:

> If somebody (A) only provide drop in files that replaces some
> functions say the Crypto API in ADVAPI32, they are not any combined
> work since they are 100% written by A. Sure the application/library
> as a whole is of course a combined work, but that doesn't matter if
> you do not distribute it as a whole.

It may or may not matter depending on what your intent is. If you
distribute them separately with the intent of getting around the
restrictions of the license it's unlikely the court will side with
you. Anyway this really doesn't matter at all.

> Note that I do not pretend to know how the courts will rule.
> But I do know that sticking the head in the sand and pretending
> that (L)GPL doesn't have large potential holes in it is quite
> naive and potentially dangerous.

Then if the LGPL holes are dangerous, the X11 license should be even
more dangerous; after all it's a much larger hole than the LGPL will
ever have. I still don't understand where you are trying to go with
your argument.

No, of course the LGPL doesn't provide absolute protection; nothing
does, and I don't think absolute protection is desirable either. There
are some things that the LGPL clearly allows, some that it clearly
forbids, and a number of border cases, that frankly are only
interesting to people who want to try to get around the license
restrictions. And what would be the point of doing that?  If the
license is not acceptable to someone, they don't have to use the
code. Who would risk bad PR and potential lawsuits just to prove that
they can find a loophole in the LGPL?

You really make it sound like the LGPL is some kind of unexplored
wilderness that we shouldn't venture into. The fact is that a large
majority of free software projects use either the GPL or the LGPL, and
in practice it works just fine for them, just as I'm confident it
would work just fine for us.

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
julliard at winehq.com