Intelligent Debate About WINE Licensing

Dr. Spork writes "If you want to read a discussion about OSS licenses that is not a flame war, check out this week's Wine Weekly News. Among the highlights are Gavriel State's arguments for keeping WINE on a BSD-style license. His company has been criticized for not releasing some very cool D3D code. He claims one reason is because 'there are companies out there who will benefit significantly from commercial use of this code, and who can afford to sponsor a portion of the development cost. Until such a sponsorship happens, we cannot apply the WineHQ license to that code.' GNU purists might think it's in bad taste to use the code as a hostage, but in a world where many rich companies rely on OSS, perhaps this signals the emergence of a new business model. You might call it 'code brokering,' and interestingly, you can't do it with the GPL."

Comments

Fucking Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

With GPL code you can dual license (and do 'code brokerage'). So a company could develop a proprietary version of your GPL program and pay you to not have it under the GPL. Their changes and your code would then go under a highly restrictive license that all closed source programs are sold with.

The only problem is that many GPL programs have many authors, so the company has to invest a lot of time to get aggrements with them all (maybe it would be smart for some projects to create some way to simplify this).

BSD code, on the other hand, is just take, take, take. Make no mistakes about it, the authors get nothing (well, they get screwed, i guess that's something).