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

Important point from Joerg Mayer On Wine List

[Karma Sucks]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 07:51:04PM -0500, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
> Yeah, that could work. But I still don't understand your objections about
> the proprietary drivers: LGPL would work just fine with that. What's your
> concern?

Look at the copy protection stuff that transgaming have added to their
tree: they licensed it and thus quite likely can't publish the source
for this - but I still want to see this in the binary only releases
they make :-) Other scenarios I can imagine: drivers for hardware -
think of a company that wants to port their software to Linux via wine
but continue using a dongle or something like that: the dongle code
is quite likely to go into the kernel itself (and may need some support
for that by the wineserver).

Ciao
Jörg
-----------

PS Since I have been modded down on previous posts, I have been slowing learning how to be a good Karma citizen from other examples on Slashdot.

Good for LGPL, too

[MikeCamel]

I've had some commercial dealings around software which had been GPLed, and from my experience in the world out there, OSS licenses really scare companies, both big and small. I believe that the LPGL is a great half-way house, in that it allows people to create software that makes the most of the platform and libraries which are already available, without necessarily "tainting" (this it the word used whenever I've been involved with license discussions) the code that, in the end, the company wants to sell, and make money from. Although I'd like to see more sofware being free, I think that driving the platform will produce more software full stop, and some of it will be free, which is a start.

The LGPL allows commercial activities on a non-commercial platform, and encourages commercial companies to feed back improvements into the LGPLed code which will improve the quality of the platform. Wine is a major project, and if it moves to LGPL, this should help the license, and by extension, the platform, as well as the availability of software. I'd definitely vote "yes".

Re:Balance.

[saintlupus]

Same thing is happening Wine as has been happening
to BSD for years. Get these vampires that forever
suck the life out of projects and do little or
nothing in return for the host.

I'm not a programmer myself, besides some basic scripting and such here and there, so take this with an appropriate grain of salt.

Do people write code in order to write good code and improve the state of computing, or do they do it in order to coerce other programmers into helping along?

It seems to me that the BSD license is representative of the first ideal, and the GPL of the second.

--saint

Re:Balance.

[saintlupus]

GNU is more like "Feel free to drink form this well, but please don't steal the bucket."

Seems to me like the GPL is "feel free to drink from this well, but if you make pasta with the water everyone gets some."

It's impossible to steal the bucket with either license.

For example, I use OpenBSD at home. Say I wrap up OpenBSD and call it "FooSecure - The World's Most Secure OS" and sell it for a hundred dollars a copy, without making anything but cosmetic changes and closing the source.

Does openbsd.org cease to exist? Of course not.

I'm not trying to be a troll, here, but I honestly don't understand how people think the GPL is so free.

(I know, that sounds like "I'm not trying to be a troll, but Emacs suX0rs!". Sorry.)

--saint

Re:Balance.

[EllisDees]

Do people write code in order to write good code and improve the state of computing, or do they do it in order to coerce other programmers into helping along?

The GPL guarantees both, while BSD only guarantees one. I want good code, but I want that code to be available for me in the same way that I made it available. If it's improved, but locked up in a proprietary product, what good does it do me as a programmer?

Re:Balance.

[Ded Bob]

The GPL guarantees both, while BSD only guarantees one. I want good code, but I want that code to be available for me in the same way that I made it available. If it's improved, but locked up in a proprietary product, what good does it do me as a programmer?

As a programmer, nothing. As a user, maybe or maybe not a lot. It all depends.

The BSD guarantees freedom for all without limitations on the 'all' or how the 'all' uses it.

Check out Apache for a good example of how the BSD license triumphs. IBM has given a lot of code to Apache even while having their own closed-source version (IHS).

In a nutshell, yes.

[DG]

The LGPL was originally called the "Library" GPL, and then later on was backronymed to the "Lesser" GPL by RMS.

Its purpose is to allow closed-source applications to use open-source libraries without becoming "infected" by copyleft source publication requirements.

So if you write a C program that links against the LGPL-licenced glibc, you are not forced to adopt copyleft for your program.

If, however, you modify the actual library code, you are required to publish source to your changes.

If WINE were to be LGPL-ed, you could write a program that would run on both Windows and [any x86 OS with a WINE port] by linking against WINE. Your program could be licenced however you wish, as the act of linking against an LGPL-ed resource does not incurr the responsibility of copyleft.

However, if you discovered that you really needed the as-yet WINE-unimplemented Windows API call foo(), and then did the work to implement the foo() call in WINE, the LGPL would force you to release the source to those changes to the public.

This is, IMHO, a REALLY REALLY good idea. The nature of the WINE project is that once a certain core of the API is ported, the rest of the work is really very modular, but very broad. Certain companies have been completing work on various APIs needed to get their pet projects working (like core gaming APIs) and then refusing to turn these changes back in to the core WINE project for "competitive" reasons - ie, if they have the only working version of these core APIs, then only they can publish software that uses these APIs (until someone re-does the port work and releases the API in a Free manner)

Result: uncecessary duplication of effort, and bad feelings all 'round.

I don't contribute to WINE, so I don't get a vote (which is as it should be) but I'm sure as hell cheering for the LGPL people. :)

DG