Wine license change: it's about time!

[Dan Kegel]

Patrik Stridvall wrote:
> > Bottom line is clear: as the project matures and becomes more
> > useful, the deterant of contributing code back from a business
> > perspective is going to greatly increase, while at the same 
> > time, the incentive under the LGPL would have also increased.
> 
> This is a just claim without any sort of proof.

It seems like a reasonable analysis to me; contributing code
represents a bigger and bigger gift as Wine comes closer to completion,
as your competitors will be able to produce useful products with 
less and less work.  Under the LGPL, this is ok, because you'll have
access to the competitor's code as soon as he starts shipping ig.
Under the X license, you're in trouble, and have to hustle to reproduce
the work the competitor did.

> For head to head competitors
> it has some (but only some) relevance. However this is not the kind of
> business models we are likely to see IMHO.

Really?  Sun doesn't compete head to head with IBM?  
 
> > In economic terms, for Wine, one spells death, the other, life.
> 
> Another grandiose claim without any substance. The world is not that
> simple. Both approaches has their pros and cons but neither is life
> not death.

It captures the essense of how the two licenses set up incentives,
though.

I think Patrik and I agree that it's important for the Wine license 
to provide economic incentives for companies to contribute to the
Wine project.  His legal analysis of the LGPL differs so sharply
from mine (or that of most people), as far as I can tell, that
just about nobody agrees with his point of view on it.

- Dan