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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