Wine license change

[Ian Schmidt]

On Wednesday 13 February 2002 01:28 pm, Brett Glass wrote:

> business. So, if the company was profitable at all, it was just squeaking
> through. (And $20M in annual revenues after ten years of existence is no
> one's idea of "good money" for a company that size.)

Sure, but they did stay in business for 10 years and were in no reported 
danger of going out of it.  Not bad by any metric for a license you can't 
make money off of ;-)

Anyway to steer back toward my point, can you name any pure-BSD/X11 players 
that are profitable?

See, I think there's a more basic problem, which is that no known business 
model works really well for source-available software when the software is 
targeted at technically savvy users.  Things like the Aladdin license are a 
nice compromise, but ultimately won't lead to Microsoft levels of 
profitability.  

The solution as I see it is for GPL/BSD/whatever programmers to actually 
cough up something non-technical users not only would use, but would 
*prefer*.  *Then* support and selling binaries becomes a worthwhile 
proposition.  Codeweavers is leaning in this direction with CrossOver - even 
though you could probably duplicate their work eventually with the current 
Wine CVS, the installer and overall ease of use make it well worth paying for 
if you value your time at all (I bought it and I love it, if you can't tell). 

To put this back on topic, I don't see any immediate benefits from a LGPL 
license.  If we knew what the threat to Wine Jeremy hinted at was, it might 
make for a more informed discussion.  I also liked Gav's idea about WineCorp 
a lot as a compromise, and I'd love to see more dicussion of that and less 
licensing flaming.