Dr. Seuss, licensing, and WINE

[Sean Farley]

On Thu, 14 Feb 2002 16:10, Roland wrote:

> At 11:31 AM 2/8/02 -0700, Brett Glass wrote:
>
> >Perhaps a simple economic analysis would help to assuage those egos.
>
> [SNIP]
>
> >The (L)GPL destroys this delicately balanced symbiotic relationship by making
> >it impossible for the vendor to add unique value. As a result, the scenario
> >described above can't happen, and it's a lose/lose rather than a win/win. The
>
> I agree with most of what you said, but have a few NEW questions:
>
> 1. Companies that benefit from WINE in this way have no incentive to
> contribute back. So why should they? That means that this kind of companies
> are of no big help to WINE, so why should we help them with the licensing
> scheme?

Are you saying that because a company has no incentive to contribute
that we should force them even though they (Lindows and TransGaming) are
contributing?  I do not mean to be rude, but that sounds a little
spiteful.

> 2. Companies like CodeWeavers that have a different business model
> probably would share code back even with the xGPL. They don't lose
> anything for doing it. And with the xGPL they don't have to fear that
> a competitor will make money out of their work.

If they will share regardless of the license, there is no reason to
change the license for this.

> In fact any producer of a Windows app is a potential contributer to
> WINE, since he will help to make its app run under Linux. A xGPLed
> WINE would help ensure that the improvements made by those companies
> come back to the community. This of course without loss to the
> contributer, since selling WINE will not be his business.

The license can be BSD, X11, Apache, LGPL, GPL or MS-EULA and have the
same effect on these companies, therefore, a license change for this
reason is moot.

> So after all it seems that maybe xGPL is an advantage, even if it prevents
> some companies from making money from WINE.

I have still not seen a good reason to change the license.

> What do you think about that?

Personally, I think the movement to change the license is political as I
have yet to read a reason to change it that was not about enforcing code
contributions.  This is not including Jeremy's request which I think is
commercial in nature.

Sean
--------------
scf at farley.org