Lindows screenshots AND THE WINE LICENSE

[Roland]

At 12:14 AM 1/10/02 +0000, James Tabor wrote:
>Personally I would be pissed off if someone is making money after all the
>work I had but into a "Free Project" assuming it would be free for everyone
>else to use, including the source.

To prevent this type of thing from happening is that the GPL was invented.
But that doesn't mean that the WINE license is bad. Lets be honest, if WINE 
was GPL, then Lindows would not exist, and WINE would be in the same 
developing state that it is now. Since WINE is not GPL, someone took his 
chance and created Lindows, and WINE is also in the same developing state, 
since that company didn't contribute anything back.
But, as you notice, this didn't make any difference for the status of WINE. 
As you see, with or without GPL(or LGPL) the developing state of the WINE 
project wouldn't change.

But there are more dangers for the WINE license. It would be possible for a 
company like Lindows hire away all WINE developers, effectively hijacking 
the project. Alternatively if Lindows becomes a success it will be able to 
hire more programmers and keep improving their own version of WINE, so that 
it would always be much better than the free WINE. I wonder why this didn't 
happen to FreeBSD.

Anyway, I'm  not unhappy with the WINE license. In fact, since most 
important open source projects are GPL, or LGPL, I think it is interesting 
to have some projects under a different license to see the practical 
implications this will have. I think WINE is a good study case for that. It 
will help us all to see the advantages and disadvantages of the GPL(LGPL) 
and draw conclusions for the future from that. Suppose that in a few years 
another Opensource project faces the question of what license it will need, 
then we can point back and say: look at the WINE project and what license 
they had and what happened to them, etc...

Just my 0.05$ Roland