Wine license change

[Brett Glass]

At 08:47 PM 2/10/2002, Francois Gouget wrote:

>  With the current license, if a company returns code to Wine it has no
>garantee that its competitors will do the same. Quite the opposite, it
>has all reasons to expect its competitors to take all that code, and put
>it in their products while not releasing any code of their own. 

That's why they won't release everything. But that's OK. They still
have an incentive to release absolutely as much as they can without
forfeiting their competitive edge.

>  Switching Wine to the LGPL will not cause the fragmentation to
>disappear right away. But it puts in place a framework where each
>company can return its changes to the core Wine while being assured that
>the other companies will do the same.

And because the LGPL won't allow them to compete, they will either
(a) use wrapper functions to circumvent the LGPL, or (b) leave
the business altogether and stop contributing to WINE. In both cases, 
WINE loses.

--Brett