License change vote results

[Sean Farley]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2002 11:23, Steve Langasek wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 12:05:50PM -0500, Roger Fujii wrote:
>
> > > The obvious result of this vote is that my previous conclusion was
> > > wrong: there is clearly widespread support in the community for a
> > > copyleft-style license. With 2 out of 3 contributors in favor of the
> > > switch, and less than 15% opposed to it, it's clear that we are going
> > > to proceed with the change.
>
> > As a curiosity, what % of the voters are affiliated with
> > codeweavers?   I realize that they are a significant contributer, but
> > as you are using the word "community", it's fair to ask
> >   a) how big that number is in total
> >   b) if there are large components in that number, they should
> >      be at least quantified.
>
> Do you believe affiliation should matter?  If 66% of all contributors to
> the public Wine tree voted in favor of the LGPL because 60% of all
> contributors to the public Wine tree are on the Codeweavers payroll, does
> that invalidate the conclusion that the community as a whole is in favor
> of the LGPL?

He raised a very interesting point.  CodeWeavers wants this change for
commercial reasons.  They are not necessarily looking out for the best
interests of the WINE project.  It would be interesting to see how the
numbers come out when all companies--it should be fair--are taken out of
the total.

If this is a community project, I would be interested in knowing how the
community felt.  For all we know, it might even be more sided with a
license change.

The reason I want to know is to see what kind of influence a company can
have on an open-source project.  Is it possible to take over or have
strong influence over a project?

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