Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches

[Roger Fujii]

Alexandre Julliard <julliard at winehq.com> wrote:
> Ove Kaaven <ovehk at ping.uio.no> writes:
> 
> > As for the license of Wine, I was among the ones opposing the LGPL last
> > time it was discussed, and I have not changed my mind. I feel that Wine is
> > most widely useful if it keeps the X11 license, and usefulness is more
> > important in my mind than making it 50% harder for companies to "steal"
> > the code. If X11 is so bad for large projects such as Wine, why is the
> > largest project of all, XFree86 (and associated projects like DRI), still
> > using it, even though its maintainer would have the power to switch to
> > e.g. the LGPL or even GPL with a snap of the fingers ("sublicensing" it)?
> 
> A thing to keep in mind is that X11 got almost killed by licensing
> issues and the proliferation of closed source vendor versions. 

You understanding of X11 is pretty flawed.  X11 had closed parts of its
implementation practically from the very beginning.  Look at the original
X11 contributers.  It was DEC, SUN, IBM...  The main reason for the dry spell
was that it became a mature product.  Why tinker with stuff that basically
works?  Vendors, quite unlike the GNU people, really resist changing things
without a good reason.  I think the current interest in the X project
was due to the advent of so many graphics cards plus 3d/video.  Look at
gnuemacs - it's GPLed, and had a really long dry spell.   Was the lack of
interest the result of the licensing?

> If the XFree86 team hadn't picked it up, there probably wouldn't be a free
> version of X11 available today.

What are you talking about?  What do you think is sitting on www.x.org?

> This is something that could happen to Wine; 

Wine should be so lucky as to be accepted like X11.....

> and if it does happen, will we find enough people to do what
> XFree86 has been doing for X11?  Maybe, and maybe not. When I hear
> people like Patrik saying that it's OK for parts of Wine to become
> proprietary because we can't do everything anyway, I'm worried.

If wine was even CLOSE to being complete, I would agree with you.  

But given its current state, I think that a *gpl license would just
discourage companies from even looking at wine (I can't see why
any company would like *GPL over X11 so long as they are not the givER -
this is not to say they won't accept *gpl, just as to what the preference
would be).  And given that IMHO, a lot of wine work to be done 
(looking at Direct* and other M$ stuff) falls under the unpleasant column
(ie, most people won't do this for fun), discouraging commercial work
doesn't seem to be the way to go.

-r