WINE May Change To LGPL

isolation wrote to us about the proposal to change the Wine license to LGPL. Jeremey's got his ideas and reasons in the e-mail there, and it makes sense - Jeremy's a smart guy. There's a call for opinions on this as well, so read through it, and offer commentary.

Comments

Offering Opinions

[Asic Eng]

I would like to ask for a more formal process. I would like each and every contributor to Wine to send Alexandre a private email with an 'Agree' or 'Disagree' opinion

It seems to me, that they really want Wine contributors to express their opinion, not the general public. They might be interested to hear from users, too, but it doesn't state that anywhere.

Re:Help, "I know nothing"

[Asic Eng]

Can someone post some info on what this LGPL is?

Basically changes to the library are treated like with the standard GPL, but you are allowed to link to it from commercial software. IANAL.

Re:Help, "I know nothing"

[SirG]

Have a look here: http://www.fsf.org/licenses/lgpl.txt

Transgaming

[SquierStrat]

For those of you following the development, this was brought up because of Transgaming, several weeks ago. Although, at that time, the plan was GPL.

Personally, I'm not bothered by it. They have a right to do as they wish with the project they created, and LGPL prolly won't harm to much else.

For those wondering...

[Hard_Code]

It seems it was a BSD-style license before:

1 @c This file is processed by GNU's TeXinfo
2 @c If you modify it or move it to another location, make sure that
3 @c TeXinfo works (type `make' in directory documentation).
4
5 Copyright (c) 1993-2000 the Wine project authors (see the file AUTHORS
6 for a complete list)
7
8 Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
9 of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
10 in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
11 to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
12 copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
13 furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
14
15 The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
16 all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
17
18 THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
19 IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
20 FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
21 COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER
22 IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN
23 CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Re:For those wondering...

[Permission Denied]

It seems it was a BSD-style license before:


This is called the X11 license. It has basically the same effect as a
2-clause BSD license, but is different from a 3-clause or 4-clause BSD
license.

The difference between the X11 license and the LGPL is that the LGPL is what
is called a "Copyleft." The X11 license imposes no limitations on what you
do with the code, as long as you acknowledge copyright and disclaimer of
warranty; the only basic difference between the X11 license and public
domain (giving up all copyright altogether) is that the X11 license protects
you from litigation with the no-warranty clause (you can't impose a
no-warranty stipulation if you don't have copyright on the code).

Copyleft licenses like the LGPL, on the other hand, impose certain
limitations on what you can do with the code. The most obvious limitation
is that any code derived from copyleft code must remain under the same
license (ie, if you make any changes to copyleft code and distribute those
changes you also have to distribute source).

Re:Transgaming??

[Spoons]

If it were me, I would feel this license-change request to be an unwarranted smack in the face. I give you something and then you turn around and accuse me of stealing. That is not very nice.

That is pretty much how they will see it. But it is really transgaming that has sparked this debate (at least initially). Transgaming has taken the wine code and developed an open source but not free software business model. They have written code which they are not willing to give back to wine that has nothing to do with DirectX. They wrote a bunch of the COM architecture which has not been in wine for a while. This code would really benefit wine in moving it to the next level (it allows install schield installers to work on wine for example). The whole problem now is not that transgaming wrote the implementation and won't give it back, but that they say they might give it back at some point in the nebulous future. So now there is no incentive for any developer to work on this major portion of the win32 api because all their work would be useless if transgaming release their code. So it is not the fact that transgaming isn't releasing the code, but the fact that they are holding the wine source hostage. The bsd license allows commericial companies to adversely affect wine either intentionally or unintentionally.

Re:Other project ?

[Stary]

The problem with WineX is that the code can't be incorporated back into Wine. And the problem with this is that since the code exists, there's no real motivation for most people to work on the same features again, especially since they've said they will contribute back once they get X subscriptions (dont remember the exact number).

Now that may or may not happen, and until it does, if it does, noone has any motivation to work on some parts of the wine project.

Re:Good for wine.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

That is the right idea, if expressed a bit frivolously. Open source is a huge business opportunity for independent developers/contractors/consultants. RMS totally understands this himself - in the past (and currently for all I know) he bills at a fairly high hourly rate to do custom work on GPL'd software for specific customers. Of course the work he does then goes back into the tree -- GPL and all, but he gets paid well, the customer gets a solution and the rest of the world gets to "stand on the shoulders of giants."

If I were in the same situation I would have treated it like an enormous business opportunity. Instead of getting torqued off by all the hassling, I would have worked up a quick and simple website advertising my services wrt consulting on development of work related to the program in question (a cheap method of legitimizing yourself as a business rather than joe random hacker in his basement). Then I would have responded to any inquiries from the company that lifted your code with an offer to work on their version of the system on a time and materials basis and with the stipulation that any work done is also licensed under the terms of the original license that they 'exploited' in the first place. Similarly for any of their customers that had managed to track me down. If there was some sort of mailing list of users I would have become a visible if not active participant with a link to the website advertising my business in my .sig in any messages posted to the mailing list.

Also, FWIW, $100/hr is nothing in a situation like that. Depending on the size of the companies involved and the size of their need for their product to be fixed, $200/hr ought to be easily attainable for a smart businessman in that kind of situation. When the big names like Oracle, Sun, HP, IBM and the Big 5 consulting firms bill their people out in the $300-$500/hr range that gives an independent expert lots of headroom to set a high billing rate and not have to burn most of it on overhead like those guys do.

Re:Balance.

[Brett Glass]

You write:

Now really there is more correlation than causation involved here, but Linux is GPL'ed and BSD is, well, BSD'ed, and Linux seems to be winning the race at this point.

Actually, Linux incorporates large amounts of code from BSD. (For example, take a look at Linux's syslogd. You'll see that it's the BSD syslogd, written by Eric Allman, who also wrote Sendmail.) So, BSD code is on every machine that runs Linux. It's also on every machine that runs FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, of course -- and every commercial version of UNIX. Windows (all versions with networking), OS/2, and BeOS also use BSD code -- particularly in the network stacks and utilities. MacOS X is based on FreeBSD Version 3.4. It may well be that there is no computer running any modern operating system that does not have BSD code on it. BSD wins by a landslide.

What's more, Apache -- which is licensed under a license that is essentially the BSD license -- has far higher market share than Linux has, or is likely to have.

I'd say that's a pretty good argument for the efficacy of the BSD License. It has done more good for computer users and programmers than any other software license. Were the Berkeley TCP/IP stack not released under the BSD License, we would not have an Internet today.