DCE 1.2.2 released under LGPL license (strategically important for Wine)

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 01:49:11PM -0800, Steven Edwards wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> --- Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:
> >  _why_ are you duplicating the efforts of two separate free
> >  software projects?
> 
> I have been scratching my head trying to figure out a way that Samba, Samba-Tng, ReactOS, FreeDCE
> and Wine can all work together on some of these projects. I don't know much if anything about
> DCE/RPC so I can only guess that all of the existing free implementations were either
 
> A) not suited for Wine by design.
 
 ... that's definitely not the case
 
 [except in samba, that is: i have made _too_ much of an effort
 to persuade them of exactly what you have been scratching your head
 over]


> or
> 
> B) there were license issues.

 _that's_ not the case!

 allow me to explain.

 DCE 1.1 is OSF 1.0 "BSD-compatible" license.

 FreeDCE is the same except for its threading library, and that's
 self-contained and "wrapped".

 [i.e. it doesn't actually link against the code, it "replaces" the
  posix threading library functions and "over-rides" them using
  Versioning]


 i know - it's a semantics issue, and if it _really_ bothers
 you [singular, plural, whatever], it's < 10k lines of code
 and could easily be rewritten by somebody like loic (hello loic).


> Option B was the case of Wine developing its own IDL compiler and some of the SMB support
> implemented in Wine. Samba being GPL caused quite a bit of a problem for us.

 yes, and i talked to rms about it, for advice, and he said basically
 "tough"!!!  he believes the LGPL to have, in hindsight, to have been
 a mistake, for free software.

 i understand where he is coming from on this, and there exists
 a clause that _could_ be evoked in Wine to turn the entire
 code into GPL - but that's rather extreme and unnecessary
 [i believe]


 now DCE 1.2.2 is LGPL'd - so there's no problem there.
 
 
 additionally, the people who worked on it [adding DCOM, NTLMSSP,
 GSS-API] have pretty much worked on it on their own, they are
 _few_ in number, therefore they own the code, and can choose
 how to license it - GPL, LGPL.

 my samba code is now actually public domain!!!!

 what i am saying is that you will have to speak nicely to
 Wez if you want LGPL'd versions of his DCOM code [to go from FreeDCE
 into DCE 1.2.2]

 _plus_ the GSS-API stuff and NTLMSSP stuff is all behind ".so"
 interfaces, the header files of which are BSD licensed.

 so even if those components remain GPL, it's okay, because
 they are .so's loaded at runtime by a BSD licensed bit of code
 (nyah ha hah haaaar)

 
 yes, it's a bit messy, but it is only messy because this is
 from several projects who haven't been working together or
 collaborating to achieve something faster than they can on
 their own.


 so there exists an opportunity to save an awful lot of time.

 and people are, 'scuse my french, dicking about running
 their "not invented here" psycho syndromes about how clever
 their open source project and how _they_ own all the code,
 is instead of realising that this is just way too big for
 one team to take on, and just getting on with it.

 so DON'T WASTE IT.

 thank you.

 l.