Wine license change

[winedev at admdev.com]

> >Sorry, let me clarify that point... the major work that was lost was done
> >by a COMMUNITY project, not one of ID's in-house ones. His point is that
> >as the xGPL forces the release of source code with any binaries, so any
> >valuable work like this won't be lost to the community.
>
> In that case, it seems to me that his remarks are a complete non sequitur.
> The source code of "community" projects that license their work under the
> MIT X or BSD license is every bit as publicly available as that of projects
> that use the GPL.

No, they are not. On the basis that a developer is not required to pass on
his code or make it available under X/BSD/etc licenses, whereas the main
benefit of the xGPL liicenses are the very viral properties you appear to
reject. Ask almost anyone who has licensed a project under the GPL, and
you can guarantee the main reason is to ensure the viral licensing keeps
the source in open distribution.

> In fact, the GPL would actually reduce the likelihood of recovering the code
> from someone's box, because commercial programmers such as myself won't look
> at it or download it.

Brett, no personal offence, but commercial programmers such as yourself
who are so damn close-minded to take this stand... do not count for but 1%
of people who do meaningful work on community projects.

MANY of the best programmers on GPL or GPL-like projects are commercial
programmers in real life. Sure, you can say the GPL may taint your
programming. But whats to stop you being fired because your COMMERCIAL
work has influenced code you wrote for an open-source project?

Several times I have stop working on a GPL project becaues my employer
wanted me to work on some commercial project with some similarity. Did I
stop because I thought the GPL would would taint me? No, although I was
aware of that risk.... I stopped because I thought my commercial work
would taint the open-source code.

It is a simple fact that thousands upon thousands of commercial
programmers work on open-source virally licensed projects. With no problem
at all. As several people in this discussion keep asking for landmark
cases to prove the effectiveness of then GPL - can you provide legal
documentation pointing to GPL contamination of a commercial project?

 - James 'Ender' Brown