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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."
Bob has a killer open source app, released under GPL, but it's not quite done.
Charlie's company is struggling for a simliar app, but is having trouble. Charlie discovere's Bob's project.
Charlie has his lawyers contact Bob to negotiate private licencing of the relevant code. Bob gets rich, Charlie's company prospers.
As for 'which is fairer'... I'm sorry, that totally depends on your personal wants and needs.
Those who willingly release under the BSD licence *KNOW* that a business can take their code and use it, proprietary, without them seeing a dime. I'm sure you won't find people who chose the BSD style license whining about 'not getting paid'
That's what I don't get about these stupid licencing arguments. It's all about what the copyright holder wants to do.. period.
I consider myself a hard-core Lilnux weenie. I don't balk at compiling and configuring software on Llinux. However, I've never had a satisfactory experience with wine in the last 8+ years.
My home and work machines both run Linux 100% of the time. For the 0.001% of things I just can't accomplish, I run an old copy of Win95 under VMWare. The only things I can't find OSS equivalents are TurboTax (too lazy to do by hand, too cheap to hire a CPA, and too complex to do over the web), and M$ Streets 2001.
No, I don't play games I can't find on Linux. I don't game much wanyway, so I don't suffer. I've taken to chess lately, so I get by with xboard/crafty. :)
I'd much rather see money/resources go into plex86 so I can ditch VMWare (which has far more cool uses than running Windows, anyway), than wine,
Method of processing duck feet