Licensing question

[Tom Spear (aka Dustin Navea)]

Dominic Wise wrote:

>On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 17:00 +0100, Andreas Mohr wrote:
>  
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 03:29:22PM +0000, Dominic Wise wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>I have a question regarding the use of portions of Wine in a commercial
>>>application. Sorry if this is not the right place to post but I am not
>>>sure who I can directly address this to.
>>>      
>>>
>>np (I don't think wine-users would be an appropriate place for such a
>>specific question)
>>
>>    
>>
>>>The application my employer develops is a financial application designed
>>>to work on Win 2K and Win XP, but we have a need for a Win32 function
>>>that is only supported in XP (TzSpecificLocalTimeToSystemTime). We could
>>>write an implementation of this function ourselves for Win 2K but I have
>>>noticed that there is a full implementation in Wine.
>>>      
>>>
>>Are you sure this is the only Win32 API with this exact functionality?
>>There might be a good reason why it's been introduced at such a late date
>>as XP+ only...
>>
>>cd wine; find . -name "*.spec"|xargs grep -i time.*time
>>    
>>
>
>Pretty sure it's the only one. Not sure why it was added later. Maybe
>there wasn't demand for it until XP came about.
>  
>
>>>Is it permissible to use the source for this function in our
>>>application? If so, what provisions do we need to make with regard to
>>>recognition of Wine and supply of source code to our customers ? 
>>>      
>>>
>>Err... no. (at least not directly)
>>
>>While Wine's license (LGPL) allows linking to Wine components, it still
>>carries the same restrictions as the GPL license when it comes to directly
>>integrating such code in closed-source programs.
>>
>>However I think(!) that it's legally valid to gather some "inspirations"
>>from such code if absolutely needed and then write your own implementation
>>of this function, much preferrably by first looking at the code and then,
>>completely isolated, writing your own quite different code.
>>(anybody please correct me NOW if this is fatally incorrect!)
>>But I'm afraid the best way to avoid license violations is to code this
>>function without looking at the (L)GPL'd implementation of this algorithm,
>>if possible.
>>
>>Another way *might* be to ask the original author of this function
>>(see CVS logs) whether he permits you to use his *original*, *unpatched*
>>version of this function.
>>
>>BTW, if you absolutely want to directly use Wine-related code in a
>>commercial (or, to be exact: proprietary) application, then may I direct you
>>to http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReWind ?
>>This is a source tree mostly consisting of the old Wine codebase before the
>>MIT -> LGPL license change.
>>Problem is that rewind is too old to already contain an implementation of
>>TzSpecificLocalTimeToSystemTime().
>>
>>    
>>
>Hmmm... I thought from Dan Kegel's earlier response that it would be OK
>to put the function into a separate library (DLL) and release this
>library under a separate license to the rest of the application. It's a
>pity if this is not permissible.
>  
>
AFAIK, that is correct.  You can license individual files within any 
application however you want, and as long as the DLL containing the 
aforementioned function is licensed under LGPL (which it would be, since 
the license would be inherited from wine), and you can release the 
entire source of that DLL, then I see no problem with it.  SO.. the 
question is, will that DLL contain _only_ that function, or will it 
contain others that need to be linked to as well, and if the 2nd 
applies, can the rest of the functions within that DLL be open source, 
LGPL'ed?

Tom