WineCorp (was Re: Wine license change)

Brett Glass brett at lariat.org
Thu Feb 14 16:48:17 CST 2002


At 12:10 PM 2/14/2002, Roger Fujii wrote:

>well, I think the assumption here was that winecorp would always release
>an lgped (or whatever viral license) version of the tree, so that 'normal'
>use would not be inhibited.

The implication here is that the use of freely available code as the basis of 
commercial products is somehow not "normal." I'm not sure how you can say
this, because it is really very common. Every modern operating system contains 
code from BSD, for example.

>> Commercial entities will have no guarantee that they'll be allowed to
>> use even their own contributions -- especially if their competitors are
>> part of the body that grants permissions.  Politics can also rear their
>> head, with favoritism toward specific vendors.
>
>you do have a point - given that this licensing issue started up again
>because of what appears to be competitive/political reasons, I guess one
>shouldn't ignore the possible influence it might have in the future.

Politics always seem to get in the way in the world of freely distributable
software. For example, the trademark "FreeBSD" is currently owned by one
of the distributors of FreeBSD, not by the FreeBSD Foundation. It was supposed
to transfer the trademark, but never has. In theory, this could allow it to
shut down the other distributors unless they used a different name for the
software. Linux also has its politics; witness the multi-way tug of war
between ESR, Perens, and Stallman.

--Brett





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