Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches

[Alexandre Julliard]

Patrik Stridvall <ps at leissner.se> writes:

> Umm. I feared that question would come. The "protection" the LGPL (or GPL)
> that Marcus proposed is IMHO largely an illusion when it comes to libraries.
> 
> Sure we might use a strict interpretion as a weapon in a PR campaign
> against possible voilators but we don't have the resources to sue
> somebody and I very much doubt we would succed either.

I think you greatly underestimate the power of such licenses. AFAIK
nobody in the world is currently shipping code (except maybe by
mistake) in violation of the GPL or LGPL, despite the fact that it has
never been taken to court. And nobody in their right mind would base a
business on shipping illegal code; even if they believed they could
get a judge to agree with them, the risk is simply too great.

> > My concern is not so much about Transgaming, I trust that Gav means to
> > do the right thing, 
> 
> Agreed and I think we should allow them considerable time to consider
> their position as well no need to rush something.

I'm not trying to rush anything, just opening a discussion. And as I
said this is not against Transgaming, any license change would not
modify the current situation at all anyway, since it obviously only
applies to future developments.

> > even if I don't entirely agree with his methods.
> 
> Well, money makes the world go round whether you like it or not. :-)

I like it, in fact as you may know I make money with Wine too... I'd
be more than happy to see Gav or others make millions out of Wine, but
I don't want to let people hurt the project, even if doing that makes
them more money.

> Now that Transgaming has done the hard work of getting InstallShield to 
> work and even been kind enough provide the source code eventhough under
> a propritary license it can't be that difficult to look at it and
> provide an alternative implementation.

The issue is absolutely not limited to this InstallShield stuff. In
fact my worry is much more about what we see happening in DirectX,
where all development on the free version has stopped.

> The work of companies that we don't trust is ignored and we work
> on as we always have.

That's true if that work is kept completely proprietary. But the thing
that the Transgaming stuff should make us realize is that if that work
is released under a free but non open-source license, it competes with
Wine for user and developer mind share, and it hurts Wine no matter
how much we try to ignore it. That is a new situation that I believe
we didn't take into account when picking the current license.

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
julliard at winehq.com