Dr. Seuss, licensing, and WINE

[Brett Glass]

At 07:34 AM 2/8/2002, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:

>Could you have finished wiht a more dumb line? LGPL _is_ open source my
>friend, 

This is not what Richard Stallman and Bradley Kuhn of the FSF say. They
say, most emphatically, that it is NOT Open Source. 

And they are, in this case, correct. The GPL and LGPL violate the
Open Source Definition, because they discriminate against a
field of endeavor (the production of commercial software) and against
a group of people (programmers who produce commercial software).

Anyone can use (L)GPLed code in the way that benefits him or her
the most... EXCEPT the commercial programmer, who cannot use the
code in his or her work, study it to learn from it, fix a bug in
it, or even look at it without risking his or her livelihood (for
the reasons described in my earlier message).

This is not irrelevant -- it's vitally important. Many of the people
who use and contribute to WINE would be hurt by the (L)GPL's "poison
pill," while the project would not benefit from it.

--Brett Glass