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

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 11:18:29AM +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:

> > I do thank you for your concern, but I don't think you appreciate the 
> > effort in ripping code kicking and screaming and integrating it in into 
> > another project.

 there is one major advantage that, i believes, makes that
 less of a concern than might at first be imagined.

 the target is Windows interoperability.

 wire.  binary.  development.  services (e.g. winreg).  
 IDL files.  type formatting strings.
 
 _the_ works.

 there are enough interfaces which _must_ be the same at various
 points to bury half a dozen _major_ free software projects up
 to their eyeballs in microsoft code cloning.

 this interoperability requirement constrains the code
 development to within some extremely strict and specific areas.

 therefore, if, just as one example, a particular area of
 functionality of FreeDCE looks difficult to integrate, then
 i respectfully ask you to consider not whether FreeDCE
 is wrong, but whether you have taken into account all
 the interoperability factors in your present design and
 implementation.

 as another example, with a very small amount of code, it becomes
 possible to add full support for NT's "Named Pipes" into Wine - by
 outsourcing the TransactNamedPipe data and the reads and writes onto
 samba tng's "named pipe" emulation transport (which is a unix domain
 socket).

 and also to samba 3 with an additional tiny amount of similar code,
 once anthony's 15dec2004 "named pipe" patch is incorporated.

 
 by the way - just in case there are any concerns: you may be aware of
 the EU / Microsoft anti-trust case.  i glanced over the judge's
 comments (got to about 300 and stopped) which can be viewed at
 groklaw.net.

 i found one that was _particularly_ interesting (and relevant)
 
 microsoft said that if they released specs and IDL files that they
 would be "giving away" their implementation [boo hoo].

 the judge respectfully reminded them [that they were talking bollocks,
 namely] that just because you have a specification it doesn't mean that
 you can claim implementations _of_ that specification to be "derived
 copyright works" of your own implementation.

 in other words, implementations from specifications by
 different parties are separate and distinct copyright works,
 and he dismissed microsoft's arguments.

 l.