BSD, Gav, LGPL, Jeremy, and business

[Roland]

At 11:16 AM 2/18/02 +0100, Boris Buegling wrote:
>sells this whole package. With LGPL, they had to give the code back or they
>can't do their project. Since they are not giving back their code, there is no
>loss in not doing their project for the WINE project as a whole. A coding

There is no loss for WINE, ok, but there is no win also. So where is the 
advantage of the lGPL? Furthermore it is not so clear that they won't 
contribute code back in the future. Look at Apple for example, they use 
FreeBSD but contributed the core of their OS X to the community:
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/
Transgaming announced that they will contribute code back. But even if they 
don't my arguments are still valid.

>company like Lindows gain everything, without giving anything back. That 
>is the

Not only Lindows gains. Every user of WINE gains. And you have to agree 
that most users probably are not developers, so they didn't contribute 
anything back. At least this will be the case once WINE is stable and 
running. And you seem to miss an important point. Lindows gains mostly by 
adding a lot of features to the free WINE(read Brett Glass economic 
analysis in one of his emails please). Whats so bad about that? If this was 
an easy job to do, CodeWeavers(or any other company) could do that. Why 
aren't they doing it themselves? Because it costs a lot. Lindows is 
investing like 5 Million at least to make their WINE run properly, and they 
didn't get a cent back for it until now. Why do you want to prevent them 
from doing that? I think it is very good that the WINE project gives 
opportunity to build businesses and employ people! It's an illusion to 
think that Lindows is making money out of the free WINE. They are making 
money by investing hard cash...

>problem that Jeremy sees and that you ignore. If Codeweavers release their 
>code
>under LGPL and the main WINE tree would be BSD, all would be fine: Companies
>could not use Codeweavers code in close-source projects, while non-profit

Again, why shouldn't companies be able to use WINE code in their closed 
source projects?

The fact that Jeremy doesn't like the way things are going is probably 
because he fears that his own business is going to suffer under it.

Best regards, Roland