License debate conclusion

[Francois Gouget]

On Sun, 23 Dec 2001, James A Sutherland wrote:
[...]
> > I'm sad.  The LGPL seems like the clearest hope we have of protecting
> > Wine against companies that want to take it and never contribute code
> > back. 
> 
> Whether or not Wine *needs* "protection" from this is another question. If I 
> have a super improved version of Wine and don't distribute it, no harm is 
> done to anyone. IMO, the "danger" of someone creating a proprietary Wine is a 
> strawman - there's already a set of proprietary Win32 implementations out 
> there from some outfit in Redmond, and it hasn't killed Wine development 
> AFAICS :-)

   Well, this outfit probably does not use any code from Wine.
   But I am pretty sure that if this line of products were taken out of
the streets tomorrow for good so that it were impossible to buy any
computer with this product or to buy the product itself in stores, well
if that unlikely event were to take place I am sure that we would see a
lot of companies (both users and vendors) very eager to contribute to
Wine to ensure that there is still a platform to run their legacy
applications on ;-)
   I am sure that we would see Wine and Winelib make big progress, at
least for couple of years... So in that way they are harming the
development of Wine :-)
   Ok it's a bit far fetched, but still, their is some truth in the
above if you think about it.


--
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
            Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes.
       That way, if he gets angry, he'll be a mile away - and barefoot.