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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.
Im a bit curious, does anyone know what that "other propiatory" stuff he is talking about, but cannot reveal any further, is ? It sounds to me that we could be talking Lindows, but I dont know that much about Lindows to know how it "emulates/wraps" Win32 API.
Any other ideas ?
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
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.
On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 07:51:04PM -0500, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
:-) Other scenarios I can imagine: drivers for hardware -
> 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
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.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Basically changes to the library are treated like with the standard GPL, but you are allowed to link to it from commercial software. IANAL.
For those unfamiliar, you can read the LGPL at the following URL:
t ml
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-license.h
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
after reading the email and then finding the wine license it makes a lot of sense to me why they would want to switch to LGPL. As someone who works with computers and has seen the myriad of license and contractual negotiations that are caused by corporate use of software, i've always wondered how free or open software would survive, and always had thought the apache and lgpl licence schemes gave the most advantage to software companies in promoting/using said software while still making a dollar with their enhancements.
No matter what we want, if there is a company behind a product, it needs to make money.
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".
In fact, I'd hazard a guess that X would be in far *worse* shape today, if it were GPL'd. Before Linux and FreeBSD sprang into popularity, X was kept alive largely by closed-source commercial concerns (Sun, HP, SCO, etc.), who very possibly would not have used it, were it to have the "forced openness" of GPL.
I think LGPL for Wine is great, and will bode well for it's continued growth in functionality and popularity.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
If they chose the LGPL, there still would be the
issue whether to choose v2.0 or v2.1
The latter is called "Lesser" instead of "Library"
and calls itself deprecated due to RMS objections
on non-GPL software.
Yes, read non-GPL, not non-open, not even non-free.
RMS wrote the GPL to exactly achieve the aim that
all software has to be free as in GPL, and so he
invented (or copied?) the viral/tainting thing.
/me votes for MIT or LGPLv2.0
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
What will this do to Transgaming? They will no longer be able to make changes and keep them to themselves - kind of seems like it destroys their business model.
I guess the only thing they could do is to for Wine themselves and never touch Codweavers code again - but that means that they now have to deal with a completely larger set of problems than they currently are.
Personally I think this is bad for Wine - Transgaming has already given so much back to the Wine project it is not even funny (including the fact that Transgaming is now looking to sponsor some portions of Wine progress) - but this switch is going to create some animosity between the two.
Maybe they should have a dual license - kind of like mysql, where it is GPL, but some companies can license the code and they don't have to contribute back.
It is a tough situation - but let's hope that forward progress does not get stopped because of it!
Derek
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
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
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
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?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
No actually not, I wrote code, quite a bit actually, on a project with a VERY similar liscence, I thought this a good thing at the time. BUT when that was wrapped and sold, ok well no big deal. BUT then 2 things happened, when the commercial package started to fail, and even before, people came to ME for suport finding I was the author. It was a port of a *nix only app at the time when the main branch was adding Win32 support, AND the commercial entity actually asked me to fix what I had writen !
The code I wrote, in the whole of the project was in EARLY beta when the took the tree and decided to commercialize it. You cannot imagine the headaches I endured. Im talking 20+ emails a day for over a YEAR ! Some downright nasty,
The code segments in question were even commented, "This is a cludge, at best for now, Things cannot be done the old way under Win32 and until a better understanding of the Win32 API calls in question can be resolved this will suffice for testing only" Now when MS relesed SP3 EVERTHING Broke.....Should I be RESPONSIBLE to support this shit ? To an entity that is making money off it ? AND then have them ACT LIKE IM OBLIGED TO ?
Not elitist, realist, I closed down that email acct shortly after.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
The only resonsibility anyone has under the LGPL is is to provide the modified LGPLed part of Wine to those who;
The only problem I see with this is if a company makes substantial changes to the LGPLed source, and they are unwilling/incapable to seperate the parts they want to keep for themselves into little propriatory modules, they would have an attitude problem.
Since patches to the LGPLed parts could be used as hooks to link in the propriatory modules, it does not seem like a dire problem for a half decient programmer. After all, they get the rest of Wine/Winelib for no dollar cost or effort.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
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).
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
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Someone who takes and closes source from a BSD-style license is saying is that they don't believe future changes made by the community are worth opening their source for. If that opinion is justified, then the project is screwed. The project is in trouble because the community is not producing -- a problem unlikely to be fixed by changing to an LGPL style license.
What's a sig?
/.
Nice trolling, Matt. And I mean that honestly; I think there is a difference between provoking conversation and, well, you know, the typical slashdot troll.
Anyway, I don't know about the rest of the world, but I am not real concerned about the relative "freedom" of licenses. I simply do not want people to steal my work without compensation. For me, sufficient compensation is that the person who benefits from my work releases their enhancements or modifications back to me. Is this so much to ask? That's what the GPL is about for a great many of the people who use it... simply an attempt at fair value exchange.
If somebody else objects to this, they are *free* to NOT USE MY WORK.
As far as "freedom" is concerned - well, if anyone can figure out how to get any I'd like to have some too.
--Charlie
In fact, I'd hazard a guess that X would be in far *worse* shape today, if it were GPL'd. Before Linux and FreeBSD sprang into popularity, X was kept alive largely by closed-source commercial concerns (Sun, HP, SCO, etc.), who very possibly would not have used it, were it to have the "forced openness" of GPL.
... less mature and less widely adopted than BSD, and in a very short time it united and began to dominate the UNIX world, even over another free UNIX that is arguably better on technical merits, namely FreeBSD. Why? Because vendors (IBM, SGI, etc.) are actually protected by the GPL in ways licenses like X11's and BSD's cannot:
... such competing products must also be open. I.e. no corporate intellectual property in a free project can be "stolen" by another, merely "borrowed."
You would probably have been proven wrong, but since we are dealing with hypotheticals there is no way to know for certain.
What we do know is that Sun introduced two different windowing systems before finally switching to X (SunView, Openlook), so X11's permissive license wasn't an incentive at all. It was popular demand that eventually forced them to use X, and such demand would have been present regardless of which free license was used. Then Sun released openwindows, which was their semi-incompatible hack of X (allowed by the X license, would have been disallowed by the GPL unless they released said changes for possible inclusion in the main tree). Many customers, ourselves included, promptly downloaded the more compliant sources from the X consortium and compiled them instead, dumping openwindows because, despite being based on X, it had too many nonstandard incompatabilities that simply weren't worth the hassle.
Contrast this to Sun's widespread promotion of gcc as the recommended c compiler until they released their own proprietary compiler years later, and your hypothesis that the GPL would somehow have been detrimental is weakened even further.
Finally, the balkinization of UNIX was due in no small part to the lack of a GPLed reference base (including X11), and the incompatible, proprietary extentions that resulted (and were never required to be released openly for inclusion in others products). Then comes GNU/Linux
* incompatible changes must be released, meaning incompatibilities will not persist. This means the balkinazation of before will tend not to happen, as the GPL encourages any forks to reintegrate their changes.
* no one can take their work and incorporate it in proprietary competing products
* vendors and competitors are actually assisting one another by default. This has significant technical (and social) advantages over the destructive behavior of early unix vendors which are obvious and accepted by scientists and engineers but foreign to many business managers. The license actually facilitates, even requires, the sharing inherent in solid scientific and engineering methodology and discourages, in some cases actually disallows, the kinds of self-defeating secrecy often practiced by less informed management by default (often without thought, as a rote behavior often substituting for strategic thinking or imagination).
The historical evidence not only doesn't support your hypothesis that X11 would have been harmed by the GPL, it even offers anectdotal evidence that the opposite is quite possibly true: X11 might well have been helped by the GPL.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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."
.sig in any messages posted to the mailing list.
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
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.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
So why do people still choose the GPL over BSD license?
evanchik.net
I thought their open debate was interesting enough that I submitted it here on Slashdot. However, the issue is now dead. They are NOT changing to the LGPL. Please leave the WINE coders alone and let them write code. They deserve credit for having a very civil and constructive debate about licensing issues, in a climate where flamewars are the rule when the issue gets brought up. WINE coders are not only excellent programmers, but they are also wise for having settled the issue. This "Jeremy" may be a smart guy, but his position lost out. Him trying to stoke up the issue and cause dissention in the improbably civil WINE community does not seem very smart to me. Last year was the time to discuss this. Now is the time to shut up and code.
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.