Wine license change

g.russell at ieee.org g.russell at ieee.org
Fri Feb 8 09:54:24 CST 2002


I think that this message as well as many other bring up some very good
points as to the needs of licensing within the wine project. Many other
messages have been clearly in the realm of bsd-gpl feudalism.
I think that trying to find a license to fit the needs of the project
without first having a good understanding of the needs of the project is a
serious error. It's pretty obvious that neither the a gpl license nor a bsd
license are optimal. It only take the observation of the lack on consensus
to see it.

All that I can really offer is this suggestion: end feuding and start a
process to
1. Gather the requirements to the licensing of the wine project
2. Determine if any combination of existing licenses can meet the
requirements
3. If no combination of existing licenses will suffice, write a license
that does.

Additionally, I advise that everyone abandon there preconceptions of
licensing. There is no mandate that I know of to license the whole project
under the same license, only use one license for any part of the project,
only use existing licenses, license any part of the project to different
groups under the same license.

Thanks for you ear

    - Gabriel Russell
    g.russell at ieee.org

>Look at the copy protection stuff that transgaming have added to their
>tree: they licensed it and thus quite likely can't publish the source
>for this - but I still want to see this in the binary only releases
>they make :-) Other scenarios I can imagine: drivers for hardware -
>think of a company that wants to port their software to Linux via wine
>but continue using a dongle or something like that: the dongle code
>is quite likely to go into the kernel itself (and may need some support
>for that by the wineserver).

>  Ciao
>       Jörg





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