Clarification on my call for license change

[David Elliott]

On 2002.02.17 02:50 Sean Farley wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Feb 2002 12:06, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 16 Feb 2002, Marcus Meissner wrote:
> >
> > > And especially:
> > > 
> http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=de&selm=1szq0fy8sm.fsf_-_%40lrcsuns.epfl.ch
> >
> > OK,
> >
> > What about this:
> > 
> http://groups.google.com/groups?q=Ingo+Molnar+group:comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine+group:comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine&hl=en&selm=67ue48%24ajm%241%40palladium.transmeta.com&rnum=3
> 
> Linus's quote was quite interesting:
> 
>     I don't personally contribute - partly because of the same worries
>     that Ingo Molnar brought up some time ago, ie the copyright.  It's
>     not that I dislike the wine copyright - I actually think that the
>     BSD-style copyrights can be a good thing.  But _personally_ I don't
>     want to do significant work under that kind of copyright and having
>     to wonder whether the best version of Wine will be free in the
>     future..
> 
> That was almost the same as Brett's message concerning working on Wine
> if it was xGPL'd.
> 
Almost, but not quite.  Brett's quote seemed more like he was trying to 
hold it over our heads like "See, I won't contribute if you go LGPL and 
you'll lose all the wondeful commercial developers like me!".  Linus's 
quote was more like "I won't contribute if you're not under a copyleft, 
but I have no vote so take that as nothing more than my opinion".  Then it 
was left at that, there was no ongoing argument for a week about it.  
Linus was certainly more tactful.

In other words, I took Brett's attitude as being hostile towards the 
project from the beginning but when I read Linus's comments there was no 
hostility involved.  Maybe it is just that Linus is a better writer.

> > or this:
> > 
> http://groups.google.com/groups?q=Ingo+Molnar+group:comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine+group:comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine&hl=en&selm=349af265.0%40news.ic.sunysb.edu&rnum=9
> 
> This made me wonder about what happened to TWIN.  I noticed they faded
> away.  If anyone thinks xGPL'ing WINE will bring more support, they
> should look at TWIN.  I am not saying the license killed it, but I am
> saying that the LGPL did not bring it any support.
> 

I am about 99% sure that TWIN was released under LGPL after Willows had no 
interest in it whatsoever.  Back in the day Codeweavers did a lot of 
projects by combining Twin and WINE into "Twine" and using that to do 
ports.  So Jeremy is certainly no stranger to using an LGPLd Wine-like 
project for his business.

-Dave