[Wine] Wine license

Vincent Povirk madewokherd at gmail.com
Sun Oct 31 00:36:53 CDT 2010


Hi Rishi,

If an OS wants to use PE for its own binaries, with the usual Unix
libraries and API's that are completely different from the Windows
API, it is not necessary to use Wine code. I would not expect the Wine
code to be very useful for this. I also don't know that PE has an
advantage over ELF, or any of the other binary formats in contention.

Wine does not have its own binary format. While the need to conform to
the Windows API does make it compatible across platforms, it limits
what a program running in Wine can do and how well it can integrate
with the native platform. When you remove the Windows API, you lose
those limitations, but you also lose the compatibility advantage.

The LGPL allows proprietary software in the same package and in the
same process. What would you like to do that the LGPL does not allow?

I don't have a problem with making parts of Wine BSD, in principle,
and in fact all of Wine used to have a permissive license. It's just
that we need a good enough reason to justify making the licensing more
complicated.

I don't think AJ frequents Wine Users. You might want to try wine-devel.



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