Wine license change

[Brett Glass]

At 11:52 AM 2/13/2002, Ian Schmidt wrote:

>Anyway to steer back toward my point, can you name any pure-BSD/X11 players 
>that are profitable?

The two most high profile ones I can think of are Wind River Systems and
Whistle Communications (now part of IBM). Of course, neither gives/gave
EVERYTHING away for free, but what they did (and, in the case of Wind
River, do) give away was all BSD-licensed.

>See, I think there's a more basic problem, which is that no known business 
>model works really well for source-available software when the software is 
>targeted at technically savvy users.

To put it more broadly, you can't make decent money without building up 
intellectual capital and insisting that people pay you to use your work. 
This is just basic business sense. This isn't to say that you can't give
SOMETHING away, but you can't give away your strategic IP. The purpose
of the GPL is to force companies to give away their strategic IP, and
hence fail.

>Things like the Aladdin license are a 
>nice compromise, 

The Aladdin license is an extreme. It is even more viral than the GPL
in that it attempts to infect other products on the same disc.

>To put this back on topic, I don't see any immediate benefits from a LGPL 
>license.  If we knew what the threat to Wine Jeremy hinted at was, it might 
>make for a more informed discussion.

I keep wondering whether it involves investors. John Gilmore, an advocate
of the GPL, is apparently a significant investor in CodeWeavers. Is he
forcing their hand?

--Brett