Slashdot Mirror
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.
If someone wants to build the latest WineX, they have to wait for Transgaming to release a binary; no CVS. People have asked for the Macrovision module to be broken out, but Transgaming have not been able to (yet?).
For those who haven't followed this, the complaint TG gives was that the copy restriction code needs to be patched in to various parts of WineX to get it to work. While I see this as a problem, it can't be a really big one.
The sticky issue is that providing a binary copy restriction module might cause problems with Macrovision Inc. -- the folks who provided this code (likely under a quite threatening NDA).
Can Transgaming make a seperate module...and will Macrovision like Transgaming's ideas well enough to allow it to be released? My bet is that Macrovision really don't want that part seperated from WineX. Right now, it's mixed in with a bunch of other code and is harder to understand. As a stand-alone module with hooks it would have a much higher chance that it could be easily thwarted on both Linux+Wine and Windows systems.
Personally, I *hate*, *lothe*, and *dispise* this type of thing. I have a few commercial non-game CDs that are useless largely because Macrovision's "Safedisc". Transgaming's version works...but only on a few CDs. Mostly, it doesn't. History keeps repeating...
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
So why do people still choose the GPL over BSD license?
Most don't choose; the project chooses the license for them.
Others do not know that there's more than one license for open source.
Still others are deceived by the propaganda that accompanies the GPL. They see the claim that the GPL makes software "free" at the top (even though it is a bald-faced lie) and never read the pages of legalese that follow.
Still others believe that by embracing the GPL they are attacking large corporations such as Microsoft. In fact, those corporations have the ability to hire programmers to implement equivalents of anything they choose. It's small companies that want to compete with big guys like Microsoft that are most badly hurt by the GPL, because the GPL denies them access to code and they're forced to reimplement. (It's ironic that the GPL is so beneficial to Microsoft, but it is. It kills Microsoft's potential competition in the cradle.)
In NO case is the GPL actually a good choice. It is an onerous and unconscionable license that will hopefully be ruled illegal sometime in the near future.