Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches

[David Elliott]

On 2001.12.15 10:40 Jeremy White wrote:
> > > (after all, they do follow on work that we did).
> >
> > Not according to the David Elliot and I agree.
> >
> 
> Ah, so the summer Andreas spent here working on
> InstallShield 1-5 was of no value, and the past
> two years that Alexandre has spent reworking
> the internal process and window communications
> infrastructure of Wine had no value, and the
> three weeks that Huw spent staring at hex
> dumps implementing Type 1 Typelibs was clearly
> just some insane British stiff upper lip sort of thing.
> 
> 

WOAH THERE... That is /NOT/ what I said.  I think even Patrick 
misunderstood what I was saying.

First of all, my comment had nothing to do with your work on Install 
Sheild or any other parts of Wine not having value.  Where did you get 
that from? On the contrary, I think the work that your company has done 
with Wine has been absolutely tremendous.

Anyway, to get on to what I was actually talking about.

Having been LGPL would have forced Transgaming to release their 
Installsheild fixes, at least the way that they did them.  And I think 
that you are correct in saying that that could be very beneficial to your 
business.  What I was saying is that /if/ they wanted to, they could write 
their own code as seperate binary objects and the LGPL would allow them to 
link it with the rest of the Wine or with the rest of specific DLLs as 
long as they provide a means for the end-user to relink it with a newer 
version of Wine.

That means that if we had been LGPL and they wanted to keep Install Shield 
stuff proprietary then they would have had to reimplement everything or at 
least a good portion of what you did.  However they would not have been 
required to have implemented the whole DLL, just the parts that they want 
to replace with their proprietary versions.  They can also mix and match.  
For example, for some functions they could release a patch back to wine.  
But for functions which they rewrote completely they could under the LGPL 
distribute it binary only.  This is still better than the current 
situation where they can do whatever the hell they want.  That is all I am 
saying.

Again, I think that this protection is very desirable and even though 
Patrick refers to it as very little protection, I consider it to be quite 
a bit of protection.  I am all for the LGPL for this reason.

I would /REALLY/ appreciate it if someone at TransGaming would please 
reply to this.  The last thing the Wine project wants to do is alienate 
TransGaming, although they seem to be doing this themselves rather 
effectively.

Now Lindows is a slightly different matter entirely.  After reading their 
website last night it seemed to me as if it is one big heaping steaming 
pile of bullshit.  At least that is what I got out of it.  I am not trying 
to bash Lindows, but maybe they should take that as constructive criticism 
and actually do something other than have a website with a bunch of 
marketing-speak on it.  I assume people working at Lindows do passively 
read this list, but has anyone actively posted any comments and/or patches?

 From the looks of it, Lindows intends to take the wine project, fix it 
(or put in some quick hacks) to make it run popular software, and release 
it as a product.  No where do they say that they are going to release 
their modifications back to Wine.  The closest thing to a statement like 
that is that they'll comply with all licenses which in Wine's case means 
jack.  They also seem pretty adamant about keeping parts of their code 
closed-source in order to make money as a traditional software company.  
This is starting to smell very rotten to me, well actually, it has smelled 
pretty rotten for a long time but now that we are talking about licenses 
it does really bring up the issue.

As a side note, Lindows got some bad press today from desktoplinux.com, 
linked to by Slashdot.  Apparently I must not be the only one who read 
"Michael's Minutes" and thought he was full of it.  I do however encourage 
Mr. Robertson to respond to this.  And I would like to see something like 
Lindows succeed, it's just that it looks like a bunch of hot air right 
now.  The article also mentions that in "Michael's Minutes" Mr. Robertson 
refers to a new way of distributing software and maybe that that is the 
key to his business.  I guess only time will tell.

-Dave