License debate conclusion

[James A Sutherland]

On Sunday 23 December 2001 4:09 pm, Dan Kegel wrote:
> 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. 

Whether or not Wine *needs* "protection" from this is another question. If I 
have a super improved version of Wine and don't distribute it, no harm is 
done to anyone. IMO, the "danger" of someone creating a proprietary Wine is a 
strawman - there's already a set of proprietary Win32 implementations out 
there from some outfit in Redmond, and it hasn't killed Wine development 
AFAICS :-)

> 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.

"Agreed"? My view is that compilers (or any "program that generates code") 
should have *NO* say whatsoever in licensing of the output. Or do you want to 
see VC++ prohibiting the development of software competing with MS offerings?

> > 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.

IMO, the current license is working just fine. Wine is getting developed and 
used by plenty of people: as was pointed out earlier, using a more 
restrictive license would have harmed Wine, rather than helping. (I'm 
reminded of the proverb about the monkey with a jar of sweets here: in 
situations like this, if you force an "all or nothing" choice on people, they 
will choose the latter...)


James.