Wine license change

[Gerhard W. Gruber]

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. These

Isn't this the same principle problem for all open source projects?

>    Fragmentation is not only bad because it causes duplication of work
> when the resources of the Wine community (companies included) are
> already limited. It also lowers the value of each of these Wine clones
> since they only handle a subset of the Windows applications. This is bad
> for the users too since it forces them to choose one or the other, or to
> buy Wine multiple times. For companies that want to deploy Wine on a
> series of computers the problem is compounded.

What companies are developping for Wine? What is the gain for a company
when selling wine? Wine is a windows emulator, so wine is a side product
that allows windows programms to run on linux. This seems to me as if
companies should be interested in returning code to wine because I think
that for most comapnies it is not their goal to sell wine, it is their
goal to increase their market for their own software and it is a good
argument if sombody wants to buy some piece and you can tell him that
you can run it on linux also because this company made sure it runs on
wine. Are there actually companies selling wine as a single product?

> higher rate than each of them could achieve separately and lets them
> offer better products to their clients.

That's the point and I think that this is also true for wine.

>    There is still a lot of work to do to get Wine where we want it. Some
> dismiss Wine by saying it will never succeed because Windows is a moving
> target. I do not believe in this argument because what counts is whose
> APIs that are actually used by applications and this changes more

I also don't think that Wine will never finished. Maybe we can't
incorporate every single call, but we can implement so many calls that
>90% of the applications will run. And if there are some strategically important applications like MS-SQL, Word, Office and such, then wine is a real alternative.

> slowly. Still Windows is evolving. Wine's shortcomings when it comes to
> COM and the InstallShield 6 installers is here to remind us of it. And
> no one can deny that Microsoft can put a lot of resources behind
> Windows.

More then a big OS community? I doubt that. :)