Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches

[Patrik Stridvall]

> Patrik,
> 
> The more I read your posts, the less I understand what you 
> are trying to
> say. You argued over many hundreds of lines over weird 
> technical details
> and various dubious assumptions about what courts will do in 
> the future.

The main point is that what is legal allow is very unclear.
I'm not primarily trying to explain what is legal allowed or
not, just pointing out some difficulities in understand
what the law really means.
 
> Stop for a movement and tell me: are you against the letter 
> or the spirit
> of the LGPL.

Asking that question is like asking whether I support the spirit of
Communism:
"From each according to his abilities - to each according to his needs."

Well, it sound nice doesn't it? However doing a little deeper analysis
I realize that the price for being able to do this is not worth paying.

Note however that I'm not equating GPL or LGPL with Communism.
It was just an example from real life, that you get more that
you wish for. See below.

> The spirit is simple: 
> 
> Here is this thing, we give it to you for free, use it for your own
> benefit however you see fit. But it's a labor of love, and 
> many people put
> thousands and thousand of hours in it, together with their hearts and
> souls. As such, they hold it dear, and they want it to survive, and
> thrive. All we ask is: if you've made _small_ improvements to 
> it, to make
> it useful to your purpose, please contribute those back such 
> that our baby
> can grow and develop together with your business. 

I'm against the fact that the GPL or to a smaller extent LGPL
tries use the doctrine of derived work as a weapon to achieve
their goals. It is a very dangerous weapon, since if the courts
or the policitians decide that a strong doctrine of derived work
is good it might be disasterous for society as a whole.

Various commerical intrest might (read: will) for example try to use
this to stop 3rd party additions to their works and I don't want that
to happend.

In short:
Be careful what you wish for:
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions"
 
> Note that I said "_small_ improvements" because of the 
> modular nature of
> Wine. If the improvements are big, the DLL separation would 
> allow them to
> keep those changes proprietary.

I don't think small improvements is a problem anyway and 
beginning an implementation of say DCOM is probaly not a
small improvement and DirectX certainly isn't.

> I fail to see _any_ moral/ethical/philosophical problem with 
> this. Do you?

Perhaps you have been more enlightend now.