Jeremy White wrote: > Okay, let me drop the analogy and come back to > straightforward facts. If I believe in the LGPL, > and release all of my code to WineHQ under the > BSD despite that, then I am a fool. Transgaming, > Lindows, name your new competitor, each of them > can take the best of my work and use it in their > product.... > > So, I think there are several fundamental problems: > > 1. The current license encourages forks. > > We have the WineX fork; I think that Lindows > is still formulating their strategy, but > they have publicly stated that they like > having some proprietary pieces, this certainly > suggests another fork of Wine.... > 2. The current license discourages competitors > from releasing their code.... > In hindsight, if I had it to do over again, > I would have held out all code we had done > over the past year or two. Where would Wine > and Transgaming be if we had done that? > > 3. The current license is harmful to the growth > of Wine, because it creates a murky, uncertain ground. ... > Having unwritten rules is foolish, IMO.... > Well, a Copyleft license provides potential > corporate citiziens with written rules. > > Second, it clarifies the code issues. Right now, > say I wanted to work on a game. Well, gosh, just > how should I do that? Should I work against the WineX > tree? But if I do that, I can't really talk about > it on wine-devel, and I can't really share my work > with others. Ah heck, maybe Transgaming will fix > my game. I'm just going to reboot over to Windows. > > And if you don't think that's a serious problem, > just look at the Wine project historically. Over > the past five years, game related patches have > overwhelmingly dominated wine-devel. Over the > past 12-18 months of Transgaming? Virtually dead....
Well said. Jeremy has laid out a powerful argument for the switch to LGPL, and even why Transgaming ought to support it. > p.s. For the record, in my mind, Dan Kegel qualifies as a major > contributor to Wine. It is through his hard work that we have a chance > that the U.S. court system will put into place systems that will make > Wine development easier and protect Wine from predatory action > from Microsoft. *blush* Aww, thanks! - Dan
