Clarification on my call for license change

Dan Kegel dank at kegel.com
Fri Feb 15 09:49:22 CST 2002


Jeremy White wrote:
> Okay, let me drop the analogy and come back to
> straightforward facts.  If I believe in the LGPL,
> and release all of my code to WineHQ under the
> BSD despite that, then I am a fool.  Transgaming,
> Lindows, name your new competitor, each of them
> can take the best of my work and use it in their
> product....
> 
> So, I think there are several fundamental problems:
> 
>     1.  The current license encourages forks.
> 
>         We have the WineX fork; I think that Lindows
>         is still formulating their strategy, but
>         they have publicly stated that they like
>         having some proprietary pieces, this certainly
>         suggests another fork of Wine....
>     2.  The current license discourages competitors
>         from releasing their code.... 
>         In hindsight, if I had it to do over again,
>         I would have held out all code we had done
>         over the past year or two.  Where would Wine
>         and Transgaming be if we had done that?
> 
>     3.  The current license is harmful to the growth
>         of Wine, because it creates a murky, uncertain ground. ...
>         Having unwritten rules is foolish, IMO....
>         Well, a Copyleft license provides potential
>         corporate citiziens with written rules.
> 
>         Second, it clarifies the code issues.  Right now,
>         say I wanted to work on a game.  Well, gosh, just
>         how should I do that?  Should I work against the WineX
>         tree?  But if I do that, I can't really talk about
>         it on wine-devel, and I can't really share my work
>         with others.  Ah heck, maybe Transgaming will fix
>         my game.  I'm just going to reboot over to Windows.
> 
>         And if you don't think that's a serious problem,
>         just look at the Wine project historically.  Over
>         the past five years, game related patches have
>         overwhelmingly dominated wine-devel.  Over the
>         past 12-18 months of Transgaming?  Virtually dead....

Well said.  Jeremy has laid out a powerful argument for the switch to LGPL,
and even why Transgaming ought to support it.

> p.s.  For the record, in my mind, Dan Kegel qualifies as a major
> contributor to Wine.  It is through his hard work that we have a chance
> that the U.S. court system will put into place systems that will make
> Wine development easier and protect Wine from predatory action
> from Microsoft.

*blush*  Aww, thanks!

- Dan




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