Clarification on my call for license change

[Steve Langasek]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 08:19:44AM -0600, Jeremy White wrote:

> Wine still requires huge capital investments to
> make it work, and any company that is going to
> invest hundreds of thousands of dollars is
> naturally going to demand ownership of the resulting
> work product.  It it were LGPL, it would be
> an easy negotiation - I'd just say "Sorry, can't
> do it."  End of story.

Just to throw another wrench into the works...

If Codeweavers is the only party releasing Wine code under the LGPL, then 
Jeremy's licensing fight with clients doesn't get any easier (at least if 
he's being honest with them ;D), because as the sole copyright holder on 
the LGPLed code, Codeweavers' hands are not tied by any legal strings when 
it comes to relicensing.

So there is significant benefit to Codeweavers /and/ to the Wine community 
if an LGPLed Wine tree thrives:  both sides get the benefit of Jeremy 
having to spend less time arguing licensing points with his clients.  When 
less time is spent arguing over licenses, more time is available for 
productive coding.

Since Jeremy has stated his intention to release future code changes only 
under Copyleft, the decision for Wine contributors to make is a simple 
one: do you believe that the benefits of potential additional corporate, 
closed-source adopters of Wine outweigh the certain loss of code 
contributions from Codeweavers, a known active contributor?

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer