Wine license change

Paul Millar paulm at astro.gla.ac.uk
Wed Feb 13 16:47:02 CST 2002


On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, Brett Glass wrote:

> At 12:26 PM 2/13/2002, Paul Millar wrote:
[snip]
> >True for non-strategic code, but what about _strategic_ code (strategic in
> >the sense that the business model assumes the retention of IP-rights). If
> >this is based on BSD-licensed code then there is no incentive to release
> >the code back to the community.
> 
> Whether or not it's based on BSD-licensed code, it's a good idea for the
> business not to release it for everyone to use. If it's of real value, though,
> it will probably have a lot of originality to it.

Sure, some of the code will have to be original, since noone pays money
for old rope. But, if the majority of code is from the BSD-licensed
project, you have a situation where a company has taken BSD-licensed code,
adopted it to its own use and _cannot_ release the improvements back to
the community.

Would people care if this happened to wine?

Paul.





More information about the wine-devel mailing list