WineCorp (was Re: Wine license change)

[Brett Glass]

At 06:48 PM 2/13/2002, David Elliott wrote:
>The main problem with LGPL is that once we go there we can never go back.

I agree.

>Wine cannot stay X11 free-for-all forever.

Why not? BSD has. X11 has. Apache has.

>Reminds me of one of Roger Ebert's columns about the movie "It's a 
>Wonderfull Life".  Because the movie is now public domain, anyone can 
>use the original print for whatever purpose.  This includes colorizing 
>it and then selling the colorized version for a lot of cash (thanks 
>Ted... yeah right).  The colorized version is a bastardization of the 
>movie and is one of those cases where you almost wish that copyrights 
>didn't expire. Especially considering that the director and the much of 
>the cast were still alive to see this horrible, horrible thing.

I happen to agree, though I don't think it's "horrible" -- just weird.
The best thing we can do is vote with our feet and not buy or rent that
version. The same would be true of a bad commercial version of WINE.

>However, the X11 license has the great advantage that it is extremely 
>flexible.  So flexible that anyone who wanted to could take the tree and 
>release it under any other license.

Actually, no. You can't change the license on existing code. But you can 
combine
it with code that's licensed differently.

>Looking at some of the more popular BSD-type licensed projects, many of 
>them have this sort of non-profit set-up.  Apache would be the one that 
>springs to mind immediately, I'm sure there are others.

FreeBSD and NetBSD do as well. But they administer the trademarks and handle
contributions; they don't try to restrict access to the code.

--Brett