Roger Fujii wrote: > > Alexandre Julliard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > My conclusion is that there clearly isn't enough support in the > > developers community to justify changing the license. So I'm not going > > to proceed with any change, either now or in the foreseeable future. > > hurrah.
I'm sad. The LGPL seems like the clearest hope we have of protecting Wine against companies that want to take it and never contribute code back. Its protection might not be airtight -- but it would clearly communicate the spirit. And my impresson was that the majority of Wine developers agree. > before this is concluded, I will add one thing just for the sake > of archival (in case this comes up again). If ALL of wine were strictly > LGPLed, basically, *all* propriatary extensions could no longer be > included. Why? Because the output of winebuild will be LGPLed, thus > no propriatary programs could use its output in creating a shared > library. winebuild is like bison in this case, and the output of > bison has a special exemption so that you can use it in something > other than *GPLed programs. Agreed, programs that generate code should specify what license the generated code is under. > This inadvertant problem is precisely why *GPLed stuff has to be scrutinized > carefully if you care about commercial relationships (most *GPL projects don't > care) and is why commerical interests are wary of projects with a *GPL license. I think it's clear that Wine cares, and should be careful not to alienate companies like Codeweaver and Transgaming. One way to deal with Transgaming might be to start a campaign to get people to buy Transgaming subscriptions, or perhaps try to rummage up enough of a one-time payment to get Transgaming to contribute their current changes back. I suspect that there's some such arrangement they'd be happy with. - Dan
