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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