License change vote results

[Russell Howe]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 09:35:46AM +0100, Stefan Görling wrote:
> 
> Just my curiosity,
> 
> Can you do some kind of estimate (you don't have to count all the votes
> again...) On how this has changed during the discussion?
> 
> I know for myself that I was for LGPL as the discussion started but the
> latest couple of days have really changed my mind, listening to the
> different arguments in the debate. If the same thing applies to others,
> those figures might be misrepresentative.

I didn't vote because I don't really think I should (I rarely use wine,
although I follow every message in wine-devel) so this message probably
doesn't carry much weight at all (since I'm no developer and I didn't
even vote anyway).

If you weren't too impressed by that, go read another message 'cause
this one will bore you :)

I've never been much of a license person, but I did skim the GPL license
and the LGPL also, to a lesser extent and quite liked the idea. The BSD
one always seemed to be too loose and too much chance that it would lead
to a company taking someone's hard work that they did for the community.
In the past few days, after trying my best to catch up on wine-devel
(still 170 license-related messages to read!) I've really begun to see
what the BSD license is all about and that it isn't quite so dumb after
all.

This all happened sometime between Alexandre calling for opinions and
announcing the voting result.

I don't know about other people, but had I voted before, it would
probably have been for an LGPLish license (if only because Brett Glass
was annoying me with his strong statements against *GPL, RMS and the
FSF, etc). Apologies to Brett - I'm starting to see your points now (at
least about the licenses) although I think if you'd put your points a
little gentler (wrong word but the closest I can think of) and with less
of the anti-FSF rhetoric, maybe people would have found it easier to see
your side of the argument.

Now, I'd probably prefer a BSD license - I can see its advantages for a
large, well-established codebase.

GPL might be worth using for something small and simple that anyone
could write themselves, although if that were the case, it probably
doesn't make any difference whether it's BSD or (L)GPL.

*shrug* Not saying there should be another vote but I wonder if I was
the only one who switched sides, so to speak - have to see what happens
with the two trees I guess.

> ...I'm not a bad looser, I simply want to assure that the figures actually
> reflects the current situation.

If anyone was persuaded to favour BSD/X11/etc over LGPL, etc then you'll
see them working on a BSD tree of Wine, not the GPL one, I suspect. The
LGPL camp will work on the LGPL (or whatever) tree and the I-don't-care
people will probably join them (since the LGPL tree would become the
main development branch).

I wonder how many of the 'LGPL' people were actually very strongly in
favour of a copyleft license... oh well.

It's been an interesting debate and one really worth watching (well,
reading :)

Hope Wine continues to become an even bigger success whatever license it
adopts (although the ability to run Exile from spidweb.com would be nice
:)

When I get the time, I'll try looking into why it doesn't work (some GDI
thing IIRC)

Egads, what a long message. Sorry guys (+ gals?)

-- 
Russell Howe
rhowe at wiss.co.uk