License debate conclusion

Dan Kegel dank at kegel.com
Sun Dec 23 10:09:36 CST 2001


Roger Fujii wrote:
> 
> Alexandre Julliard <julliard at winehq.com> wrote:
> >
> > My conclusion is that there clearly isn't enough support in the
> > developers community to justify changing the license. So I'm not going
> > to proceed with any change, either now or in the foreseeable future.
> 
> hurrah.

I'm sad.  The LGPL seems like the clearest hope we have of protecting
Wine against companies that want to take it and never contribute code
back.  Its protection might not be airtight -- but it would clearly
communicate the spirit.  And my impresson was that the majority of
Wine developers agree.

> before this is concluded, I will add one thing just for the sake
> of archival (in case this comes up again).  If ALL of wine were strictly
> LGPLed, basically, *all* propriatary extensions could no longer be
> included.  Why?  Because the output of winebuild will be LGPLed, thus
> no propriatary programs could use its output in creating a shared
> library.  winebuild is like bison in this case, and the output of
> bison has a special exemption so that you can use it in something
> other than *GPLed programs.

Agreed, programs that generate code should specify what license the
generated code is under.

> This inadvertant problem is precisely why *GPLed stuff has to be scrutinized
> carefully if you care about commercial relationships (most *GPL projects don't
> care) and is why commerical interests are wary of projects with a *GPL license.

I think it's clear that Wine cares, and should be careful not to alienate
companies like Codeweaver and Transgaming.  One way to deal with Transgaming
might be to start a campaign to get people to buy Transgaming subscriptions,
or perhaps try to rummage up enough of a one-time payment to get Transgaming
to contribute their current changes back.  I suspect that there's some
such arrangement they'd be happy with.

- Dan




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