has the LGPL licence fell through ?

[Brian Vincent]

> Wine is LGPL as I understand it.  Codeweavers takes advantage of that, as do
> other companies I imagine (Transgaming?).  What's one more company basing a
> product on Wine code, provided they follow the license they agreed to when they
> received the code?
>
> Give them a chance is all I am saying...

Well, there is such a thing as contributing to the community as
opposed to ripping it off.  They are perfectly within their rights to
work in a bubble or not share any of their ideas with anyone. They can
also make simple bugfixes in Wine and not even bother to submit a
patch to wine-patches.  Heck, they don't even need to send a thank you
note.  That's not the right thing to do and we all know it.

Wine has a track record of being ripped off by companies.  Perhaps
it's not as bad as other projects, such as Samba, but it's definitely
happened.  So far SpecOpsLabs have a pathetic track record that only
seems to be getting worse.  Let's run this down from the beginning:
1.  They showed off a product without any explanation that Wine was
involved.  In fact, at first they completely denied Wine was part of
their product:
http://www.winehq.com/?issue=220#Project%20David%20?

2.  Then Ge van Geldorp discovered that Wine really was part of it:
http://www.winehq.com/?issue=222#Project%20David%20Uses%20CodeWeavers%20CrossOver%20Office

3.  That was followed shortly thereafter by Mike McCormack discovering
a CrossOver only hack was visible in a screenshot.  So they basically
ripped off CodeWeavers.  SpecOpsLabs never had an explanation for why
a CrossOver specific bug some how made it into their tree.  In fact,
they specifically denied using CXO:
http://www.osviews.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1454

(Given the choice between believing Mike, who probably knows all of
the gory details about that bug, or SpecOpsLabs.. well, I think I'd
trust Mike any day of the week.  And twice on Sundays.)

4.  Then SpecOpsLabs sent one email to wine-devel asking for info on
how to contact Alexandre.  Honestly, how difficult is it to find
Alexandre's email address?  How many "Alexandre Julliard's" do you
think turn up when you type the name into Google?  Several members of
the Wine community graciously replied to the email with no response
from them.
http://www.winehq.com/?issue=241#SpecOps%20Labs%20Steps%20Up

Everyone asked for more info so if they planned on contributing that
there wouldn't a duplication of effort.

All in all, we've graciously asked them to contribute and not gotten a
response in return.  You know what pisses me off though?  They can't
even spend five minutes sending a thank you note to wine-devel.

By the way, I only wrote this response since I plan on including it in
this week's WWN and I figured I'd write it here first rather than
editorializing it.  Does anyone think it's unduly harsh?

Merry Christmas, SpecOps.  I hope you enjoy your gift of 1.7 million
lines of code.

-Brian