Wine license change: it's about time!

[Roger Fujii]

Gavriel State <gav at transgaming.com> wrote:
 
> Quite the opposite: It is not 'competitive advantage' that concerns us, 
> or others using our code without contributing their own code.  It is 
> simply that we could not and cannot afford to do our development without
> monetary compensation.  If the OLE DLLs had been LGPLed, we could not
> have been able to afford to do any DCOM work, since we would have had 
> no prospect of getting paid for it.  
> 
> Under the LGPL, the only possible business model is this:
>   a) Find someone who might need some piece of code
>   b) Sell them on: "We can do this for you, and release it under
>      the LGPL for $x dollars. We're really good at what we do,
>      honest"
>   c) Do the work, and hope to actually get paid.

well, a)+b) is really the same, and you left out d) sell support on the
changes, but yes, there are only 3 choices.  I really think that *GPL
will have problems in the long term because there is no real economic way to
sustain it, but it's going to take VAlinux/SUSE/RedHat to finally go down
in flames for people to take a long, hard look at the issue.  Think the
patent model (with a much shorter protection period) is a good place to start.
 
> The LGPL simply slams the door shut on that whole model, saying in effect 
> "It's my way or the highway".  

It also slams the door shut to non-development areas too.
 
-r