Wine license change

[Brett Glass]

At 10:20 AM 2/13/2002, Dan Kegel wrote:

>> No; the LGPL would provide a way for the vendors to sabotage
>> one another -- and, most likely, ALL fail as businesses.
>
>Sabotage?  Brett, you might be getting a bit carried away here.

No, I'm not. Richard Stallman himself has stated that the purpose
of the GPL's "poison pill" is to turn developers against their
colleagues and the organizations for which they work. His writings
even urge programmers to put GPLed code into the work they do for
their employers for the express purpose of forcing them to give
away the code!

>The LGPL will provide a way for service-oriented businesses like 
>Codeweaver or Red Hat, who write code for others for a living, to thrive.  

No company that has adopted an FSF license for its main work
product has EVER thrived. Even Red Hat has lost millions.

>Intellectual-property-oriented businesses might not be so happy
>philosophically with the LGPL, 

It's not just a philosophical problem. The FSF licenses are designed
to destroy them, and have done a good job of it everywhere they've
taken root.

>but if you believe the arguments of Patrik and
>Roger from Dec 18th or so, which say the LGPL is powerless
>to prevent companies from linking in proprietary extensions,
>they ought to be able to cope.

It's not clear that the LGPL actually allows this. The FSF has
rattled its saber and forced companies to back down on such
strategies before.

--Brett Glass