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Wine Continues To Move Towards License Change
uhmmmm writes "The Wine developer's votes are in. Wine will change license, as was suggested would happen, but it's not yet decided to what exactly. Alexandre notes 'We now have to decide the implementation details, like the exact
license used, whether to require copyright assignments, etc.'"
It should be a BSD style licence so that people can use it how they like. Or else people will just use windows instead.
Sig is taking a break!
If WINE is to make inroads into the corporate sector, the BSD license is the way forward. The GPL has negative connotations due to RMS's somewhat anti-corporate stance and communistic leanings, neither of which play well to corporations or the general public in these days of the war against terrorism.
So, to sum up, the BSD license is the way forward.
With the power that wine gives to *nux and the very nature of open-source software being free a licence to re-sell. It is important to protect the work and rights of the devolpers. And soon the day will come when Linux is 99.998% M$ compatable... an then... we will rule the world....
:)(smile)
seems only appropriate, as they try to copy everything else.
How will changing to the LGPL help wine? How will it help the industry? Isn't the idea that someone might "make it proprietory" exactly what the wine project set out to acheive? Wouldn't it be great if a large number of companies were to figure out what wine is and how they can use it and finally put up some competition for Microsoft?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Hi there,
:
I'm in favour of a change in the Wine license that allows to
- Keep the Seurce Code Open
- Let any software company to use it with their products in a way that WineHQ and the SoftwareCompany both beneffit from it.
Wine, everyday a little bit close to implement all of the Win32 function calls, is seen as a very good oportunity for software makers. But...
(Yes, I know, it's not the best thing. I love to see Linux native software only mysef. But if this new license allows a company to have a "Linux Version", IMHO this is a Good Thing for Linux.. Others have done it already: MusicMatch, Kylix 1.0 come to my mind.),
But, of course, the terms "GPL", and "Open Source" are a heavy obstacle (but untrue) for companies interested in making money in any platform. Specially when they associate GPL and OpenSource with and "Viral License".
Yes, there's Microsoft's FUD (remember Ballmer about "Linux as Cancer" and the likes?), lot of mis-information or simply plain lack of knowledge. And this can (is) prevent(ing) many companies to offer "Linux Versions" of their products. Quicken anyone? Children games? Stationary-making programs? software that comes with your hardware?.
So, with WINE offering a new license that allows a for-proffit company to sell Linux-products is good for Linux. With Wine offering a new license that is at the same time Open and usable by SoftwareMaker Inc. is a goog thing.
Hell, maybe they will even supply (paid) developers to the Wine project!
Those are my thoughts. What do you thing? Why I am right? why I am wrong? I am very interested in the Wine project. And I will read this discussion.
All the best.
A nice side effect of the "BSD License" is multiple targets for Microsoft as there's more commercial exploitation of WINE, and thus more dissipation of the energies of Microsoft, especially as they draw more fire for trying to suppress their competition, thus a better chance for more open-source projects to thrive in spite of annoying the Evil Empire at Redmond.
Nearly anything that increases commercial participation in Linux is good, especially if it directly attacks the Windows semi-monopoly. Seems good! :)
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
So, being the inquisitive type, I have to wonder what it was that Jeremy couldn't talk about that convinced him to raise this issue again after it had been "settled" before. Any ideas? Lindows? (--that's my speculation).
This is like Apple switching to preemptive multitasking instead of cooperative multitasking. Cooperative multitasking was fine as long as everyone played by the (unenforced except by community practice) rules. But, at some point some big player, or a horde or little players, is going to come along and not play be the (unenforced except by community practice) rules.
It looks like someone was making a bid to slurp up Codeweavers or something, eh? "Here's a lot of money, dude, give us your soul!" But a miniature RMS-resembling angel on the other ear said "GPL is the path to Free-dom!". And he swatted that one down, but then a more reasonable pixie sort of thing that looked halfway between a penguin and a demon says "Psst--use the Deprecated license, Luke". And that's what he put to the vote.
Liberty uber alles.
Not trying to be a troll...hear me out.
I've been mulling over the GPL and BSD licenses for some time, trying to think of a way that businesses can make money while the community still benefits. (Isn't everybody?) So where does this come together?
Perhaps the scientists have the right idea. There's currently a strong leaning in the scientific community about the free release of journaled articles six months after publication. The journal gets to make money, but the research makes it into the public domain after a short time period.
Perhaps the approach that WINE can take would be for contributions to go GPL after a certain time period, say, six months or a year. A business can make money during that time, but as commercial systems become 'abandonware' after a period of time, the code can return to the community. Licensees could always choose to forego the time delay, publishing immediately.
What do others think? Is this a good balancing point? It just occurred to me that this is what ID has been doing with Doom and Quake.
"It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created." Dr. Richard Wallace
Nicely said. However, I wonder about these licenses. Some people have called the GPL communistic, and I suppose the way Microsoft became so rich was about monopolistic capitalism at it's worst.
I suppose now we need a licensing philophy along the lines of National Socialism. I can see it now, programmes that require people to say "Heil Hitler" before it would start.
I can not see what makes lindows special , I read the review of it on newsforge and it sounded crap.
wtf does lindows really offer that wine does not ? Lindows looks to me just like a repackaged version of wine with a catchy name and some superficial features. can any one explain to me what makes it a unique product worth
buying ? The review on newsforge just seemed to show how little it ran and I felt that the review went extremly light on them,I can understand the version they had was a test but still what is the point of sending something which is essentially not very usefull or different to wine running on some other linux varient at this stage of development for review ?
_________________________________________________
Alexandre posted the results of his survey to the Winedev newsgroup this morning (in my timezone).
Of people who expressed an opinion and who had contributed code, the results were roughly 2 to 1 in favor of moving to the LGPL.
Of people who expressed an opinion and who had NOT contributed code, the numbers were more favorable to remaining with the X11 style license.
<opinion source="me">
People who code prefer LGPL, people who bitch don't.
</opinion>
www.eFax.com are spammers
It was inevitable I suppose, as Linux is now on the verge of making really big money and go toe-to-toe with Microsoft in a few years. Bwwwaaaaaahaaaahaaaahaaahaaahaaaaaa.
I spilled my coffee all over my screen and keyboard when I read that.
toe-to-toe with Microsoft. Are you INSANE ?
Microsoft has something called a business model.
It also has something called a strategy
It also has something like 100 Billion Dollars of cash in its checking account
Do you Linux weenies really really believe in this fantasy world you talk about ?
You have obviously never spent any time inside a large corporation or you would
realise that Windows has WON THE BATTLE.
It is simply not cost-effective to even evaluate other operating systems.
Unfortunately for you Linux Zealots, it turns out Operating systems are a natural monopoly, and Billy Boy 0WNz Y0UR 4553s
Um, read it again: the license is going *from* BSD *to* LGPL.
I did read the article. My point was they want to stop people using the library for the very things people actually want to use it for. If the majority of the developers want that, then it's fine, but it won't help the popularity of the code if lots less people use it. The developers seem somewhat confused over _why_ they wrote the code in the first place. It's like saying "use wine, it's better than windows. But don't think of selling your improvements for money." Fine. But that will just make people use real windows instead. It's not like someone profiting from improvements to wine harms its development in any way. And I hardly thing the word "bigot" is appropriate. As one of the original developers of wine I think that I have every right to state what I think of the license conditions. My contribution was very small and a long time ago, and has pretty much all long since been replaced by better code, so I'm not voicing an official opinion over what should happen to the code. It should be up to the active developers. But I find it amusing that people who probably had nothing at all to do with the development of the code feel fit to hurl abuse at those people who did for daring to have an opinion over who should be allowed to use that code, and under what conditions.
Sig is taking a break!
Everyone's up in arms about the License and the program really does not consistently work as yet. What gives?
Am I asking too much? Are they close enough to making it really work so that they now need to firm up the license arrangements?
Newsfollow.com
Like an asthmastic ant... with heavy shopping.
Heh, it works really well actually. Kudos to the VMWare team.. it's a great product.
;)
Their tools package is just cool. The handling of the mouse crossing the edge of the window impressed me, as did the overall speed of the graphics.
If I actually needed a Windows distro around, I'd definately buy it
Modded Interesting??? Maybe you moderators ought to read the farkin article.
Parent poster's entire point is that Wine is moving from GPL to BSD
Article says that Wine is moving from BSD to lGPL
So I guess the only interesting part of the post was how wrong the parent was.
Any intelligent moderators want to *properly* moderate the completely inaccurate parent post?
Yet, the current code is good. It's quite good. Yesterday, I fired up a demo version of Lightwave 7.0 under it. Most of the application worked flawlessly including interactive modeling, camera position, and on-screen rendering. Though I didn't test everything, the main problem I found was that the file dialog had a focus problem and would flicker. I can't see that still being a problem when an official 1.0 release of Wine is released.
With the current licence, and the recient improvements to Wine, it is becoming a tempting target to hijack. With comparitively minimal funds, about 10 years of work could be rolled into a commercial product that never gives a line of code back.
The LGPL or similar licences would allow largely unhindered commercial production with a much greater chance that many changes would be folded back into the core Wine tree. A licence like this would not prevent a company or individual from making supplementary and seperate libraries that are closed, but it would encourage some more general code to be returned. That's at a minimum.
The best case would be that larger changes are rolled back into CVS, and good feedback like the kind that came from Codeweavers, Corel, Transgaming, and Lindows (benifit of a doubt).
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
This is good, and I agree with the change, I think there has been a fair amount of bad feelings by developers when code has been wrapped in a proprietary product. Even though none of those poroprietary products have sealed their efforts, codeweavers does donate back to wine and transgaming is available via CVS.
I am curious about what will happen to the existing wine trees out there and in process of development. If I am correct they will not be allowed to borrow from the tree effective date being the liscence change, they will in fact, with the amount of work that goes into wine, end up with a stale tree quickly.
Is there a way around this ?
There is obviously no way to make the liscence apply retroactivly, and that would be wrong, is there any way to ensure certain portions of the new tree dont make it into a proprietary product bundle ?
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2002/02 /0129.html
This is from a person who has made money developing wine-related stuff but thinks he won't be able to under the xGPL scheme. You have to (well, you should) ask whether shutting out this kind of development is good for the project.
Liberty uber alles.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
+ the standard disclaimer of liability here. So if you want to talk about how restrictive both are some how restrictive, and both are "viral."
How we know is more important than what we know.
You may want to go back and read the article. The article is a vote on whether or not to switch to a copyleft style license. This means that they would be switching from a permissive free software license (like BSD/X11) to a copyleft license (GPL/LGPL)
In other words, Wine is going against the trend you are accusing them of.
So basically, I found your post relatively informative except for the fact that all of the content in it was 180 degrees from the situation that is unfolding currently in reality.
Won't you join us? (In reality, that is)
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
It's amazing how they call a license that mandates freedom and requires you to contribute to the common good "restrictive," and by contrast a license that allows others to poach and return nothing is labelled as "more free."
If you mandate that I must do something then you are restricting my freedom. If you say "do what you want" then you are promoting more freedom than if you say "do what you want but...".
mandates freedom and requires you to contribute to the common good
Is this ironic or what? That sums up my opposition to the GPL right there.
Much better if you remove all obstacles to freedom and contribution to the public good, than forcing people to do so. I don't see any difference between your statement and totalitarianism. Sure the verbiage is slightly different, but the aim is the same - to make everyone fit into YOUR view of how the world should work and not to reach a common consensus. That's the part I hate - being told by some self-righteous bastard that I have to do this or I am not a "good person".
blinded by the almighty (American) dollar
Feel free to give up your day job if you don't want to depend on the dollar anymore. But until the Star Trek economy starts making better headway, we're stuck with it. You may not like the game - but most of us have to play it in one form or another.
Linux is now on the verge of making really big money
And I suppose if you have your way, this won't happen either because it will lead to more dollar-blindness.
Just so you know - I am in favor of a better world - but we can't get there overnight and we definitely can't get there by immediately destroying the institutions that have brought us this far. While the technological rate of change is pretty damn fast, people need time to adapt and wrap their minds around concepts. It might be nice if we could all wake up and start getting along, but we're talking about a process that's going to take several hundred generations and you're pissed because we're on step one.
We'll never see this world you dream of, nor will your children. But if you're lucky your greatX5-grandchildren might.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
"Moderating trolls and flames as "Offtopic" is Unfair and will be metamoderated as such. How the trolls attack me now...."
Yes, I got dinged a number of times by these `moderating trolls' and so I don't contribute anymore.
They don't moderate, they express their opinions by their votes.
"I've said it before a thousand times, democracy simply doesn't word." Kent Brockman (cartoon character)
Wine is actually a trojan horse of a strategic nature. Microsoft, along with the Illuminati, the Republican National Party, and the Yeti, funnel millions of dollars into the development of Wine behind the scenes. The idea is that people on other platforms should still be tied to applications on Windows. At a certain point, hapless GNU/Linux users will awake to the startling reality that even though they're running linux, they spend all of their time running Windows applications. They'll all eventually cave in and return to the warm bosom of Microsoft, never again to stray from the teat that provides them the poison they love so dearly.
It's all a conspiracy. I'm starting to think that ESR with his "open source" nonsense is actually also an operative for Microsoft, working deep, deep undercover to bastardize the "free software" philosophy by dumbing it down into "open source", all the while accepting licenses like the APSL, moving step by step, inch by inch, to fully proprietary licenses at which point he can join hands with Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Baalzebub rejoicing in their victory over the good things in the world.
Of course, all of this could be simply about the developers of Wine wanting to change to a copyleft license to prevent some bastard company from coming along, stealing everything, repackaging it with a 2KB patch, and closing the source.
Course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
If you buy a new Macintosh, you will find that it is really a BSD Unix machine under the hood. People who would never knowingly install BSD will be getting it anyway, and maybe they will grow to like it. Even if they don't, geeks like me will be able to sit down in front of their computers and get something done. Sure, BSD lets companies "steal" work that was never written to make money in the first place, but in exchange, YOU GET MACHINES RUNNING BSD SOFTWARE. Adoption and use of software is a sign of success, not of failure.
It is Linux people doing the staling. Not MS or Apple.
Don't know why it's not 'Score:2' to begin with.
This is what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they allowed patents and copyrights in there in the first place.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
...when he submitted his resume
I hate Wine and the people who promote it. If you want 'nix, run a 'nix. If you simply cannnot live without Windows software, then for crying out loud run some version of Windows. Then at least the software will actually have a chance of working as intended. Why are we so eager in Linux land to emulate a company like Microsoft. The Linux world very akin to the Communist regimes of yore: they are quite capable of producing a knock-off of others' tech but quite incapable of original thought or design. Linux needs people with vison, not people who can knock off the look and feel of second rate software. Wine makes me sick, excuse me while I go and barf.
I sort of have the opinion that before anyone takes on m$ft and bets the farm on their OS they might want just a little bit of security in their investment, namely that they can keep competitors from cloning their product, something the LGPL is not good for as anyone who has bought a copy of their m$ft compatible OS can demand the source code. You have to walk before you can run. Wine should keep their code free (truely free) until there are proprietory forks and then they should convince me (the consumer, who copyright actually exists to benefit) that the open source version is better.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I would have to agree. Gentleman like Mr. Gates, Mr. Glass, and other license 'viewholders' share the common belief of corporations not being able to use GPL'ed code. They would lead us to believe a company is going to be ever-profitable and ever-wonderful, but an evil engineer slips in 'print "Hello World!\n" and all of a sudden, Capitolism, Bambi's mom, and eveything nice dies.
I can't see why people get so offended by the GPL. There is no example of an individual ever having been forced to use the GPL in a project. Somehow I still have the freedom to either a.) not use the code, b.) write my own code (perish the thought), or c.) find other code.
The LGPL is a very generous comprimise. You get protected code that you can link against, allowing you to keep your project as seperate as you wish.
Wasn't this the Wine development team's decision? Isn't that all that matters?
Well, it depends on your perspective. I'm sure many MAC users would like to run some windows app on OSX.
Do you think with the LGPL a company would work on PowerPC emulation within Wine? It could fill a potential need, that the 'Wine community' isn't working on, but they can't sell their product when it's available for free, so why invest in it? I don't think that helps the community.
From the POV of most of the WINE developers, that's just fine. The users can suffer until someone with their train of thought joins the cliq. Yes, I've been following the thread. The developers are mostly all "Me, me, me"... Which is just fine if nobody actually is looking to use your product..
It's like cutting your nose off to spite your face.
Then again, something else never mentioned is the probability that a patch from a company gets accepted into the tree in a reasonable amount of time. I could hack something up to make it work, and the xGPL basically requires that I share that work. What if my changes are never accepted? That LGPL code is now essentially BSD (not the license doens't change, but my add-on work may not beavailable), because a company could write such bad looking code, or code that doesn't fit the 'template', that it's never accepted. Yet, they've complied with the LGPL because they're returned their work to the community
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Wine is DITCHING a BSD license because of commercial code theivery in favour of GPL.
Your (and my) opinion is irrelevant - the actual Wine programmers voted for the change to GPL.
GPL:
"5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it."
You're not required to accept the licence, but then you are not granted any *rights* either. So if you redistribute or create a derivate, or anything else requiring permission from the copyright holder, you need a licence.
It's a perfectly valid defense that you've not accepted the license, as there is no proof of that in one direction or the other. However if that's your defense you also incriminate yourself as guilty under Title 17, Ch. 5, Sec. 506(a)(1) for infringing copyright for commercial gain, a crime punishable by 5 years in prison + fines. (IANAL btw) The GPL is in fact probably more enforcable than the click-through licence, as the click-trough is presented to you after the purchase.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I get it! It's a PUN!
Don't read this!
From reading the archive, I think Jeremy White was making another point. The problem is not so much that TransGaming is not sharing code. The problem is that everybody knows that they are doing a lot of heavy lifting to make games work. JW says that prior to TransGaming entering the field, the bulk of contributions to WINE were game related. Since no one wants to duplicate TransGaming's work, non TransGaming DirectX contributions have dropped off to almost nothing. He also mentioned that one developer spent three weeks duplicating some InstallShield functionality that CodeWeavers developed. Basically, proprietary companies are being seen by developers at large as "owning" particular segments of Wine development. In short, JW is worried about an ongoing brain-drain.
There is another problem. He says that he and other core developers are often hired to implement spot bits of functionality that allow particular applications to be ported to *nix. The current licence encourages the clients to want to own the for hire work even though it is the end result (the application can be sold on *nix.) that is important and not a few snippets of code to WINE. If WINE were LGPLed, WINE developers would still be hired to assist with application porting but they wouldn't waste their time on work that doesn't advance the overall effort. This bears some explicit pointing out for would be trolls. The LGPL means that the ported applications remain the property of the clients yet would allow the changes to WINE to go back into the main tree. JW wants a clear set of rules so clients know before the fact what belongs to the project and what belongs to them.
The Wine project might be well served by imitating Sleepycat and their dual-licensing model for Berkeley DB.
Berkeley DB started as a small embedded database library which only supported hash tables and btrees. Since it was written for BSD Unix as a replacement, it was released under the BSD license. After a few years, it was widely used, but it still only offered access methods. When Netscape wanted more features, such as transactions, disaster recovery and multiple-user support, Sleepycat Software was founded to further develop Berkeley DB (on the strength of a licensing deal with Netscape).
The new version of the software was released under the Sleepycat license, an OSI-approved license which allows Open Source applications to use Berkeley DB, but (unlike the GPL) appears to be compatible with any Open Source license. For proprietary applications, Sleepycat offers a more traditional licensing option to companies who don't wish to distribute their source code. Revenue from such licensing funds additional development of Berkeley DB, to the benefit of all. (For example, Berkeley DB 4.x adds replication and high-availability functionality that surely would not exist without the funding received through this dual licensing.)
Perhaps the Wine project should follow this example? Wine could be placed under a license like Sleepycat's, which would allow Wine to be freely used by Open Source projects (whether GPL or not), and proprietary companies could pay for a license which allows proprietary use. Funding from such licensing could be used to further develop Wine, to the benefit of proprietary and Open Source users alike.
BSD or LGPL licensing allows proprietary companies to profit from the hard work of the Open Source developers without giving anything back. Sleepycat's licensing model forces them to give something back, either by contributing more Open Source code back to the community, or by paying cash for the privilege of avoiding that -- which could then be used to fund development that would benefit the Open Source community.
It's a win-win situation, and it would ensure that contributors don't get exploited. It could also lead to funding that might greatly accelerate the development of Wine, even more than relying on companies like Corel to contribute back changes they've made to the codebase.
I'm not a contributor to Wine, but I'd suggest they consider following Sleepycat's example -- it appears to work well for them, why not for Wine?
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Actually, you're right. I misread the article and spoke out of turn. I guess I'm paying the price for it by the moderation. Sighhh..
However, I notice other posters talking about "BSD is best" and "use LGPL and retire your sofware" getting the "moderation of approval." They are just as off topic as me, yet for some reason the moderators like it.
I'm Offtopic, Flamebate, Troll and the others are Interesting, Insightful, etc.
I guess we know where most of the crowd here stands.
Dont discount someone involved in the Wine project, or maybe the FSF purchasing a copie of it simply to get the sourcecode back.
Yes, this is completely true.
Of course, if I were a Linux zealot, I'd simply reply that, "We may have lost the battle, but we'll win the war!". If I were a Linux zealot, that is.
If you mandate that I must do something then you are restricting my freedom. If you say "do what you want" then you are promoting more freedom than if you say "do what you want but...".
There is no true freedom without responsibility. "Doing what you want" is not freedom at all, but a license for anarchy and chaos.
Freedom and responsibility are intimately connected. Our modern culture seems to ignore the responsibility side of the coin. In reality you cannot possibly have freedom without also certain basic responsibilities to the larger society. In the GPL I see a nice balance between those two forces.
Monopolistic forces want the freedom without the requisite responsibility.
So what if it's mandated? So is paying taxes.
There is no true freedom without responsibility. "Doing what you want" is not freedom at all, but a license for anarchy and chaos.
To have a functional society there must be a balance between freedom and rules. My point is that when it come down to pure freedom, anarchy is the most free type of society. Sure the GPL requires more responsibility to properly wield and also may spawn the most benefits but the BSD License is more free as it leans toward software anarchy.
While I'm not thrilled about the sudden fad of projects abandoning the GPL, there is one potential positive thing that can come of it. It shows corporation that may be thinking of developing for linux that they can start with the GPL and fairly easily switch to a proprietary (or BSD style) license with relative ease -- especially compared to going the other way around. In both instances, you would need to track down contributions from independent copyright holders, but in the case GPL software, it would be easier to re-implement (or link to) than proprietary modules.
This may help companies that would like to grow a user base with a GPL product and then pull a bait and switch on their users and close it up and start charging. Or charge for "add ons". From the companies perspective, it shows that while the GPL may be viral, the disease is not terminal (sorry for pun). One downside they may perceive are that users will continue to use the earlier GPL versions, but everyone loves new features.
While this sounds like encouraging bad ideas and proprietary trojan horses into a free software, I'm confident that the majority will eventually see the benefit of open source and be reluctant to branch. If not the majority, then survival of the fittest. We don't really *need* seven office suites (5 plus vi, emacs, and latex is plenty.1) anyway. Sure, there'll be times (when the stock price takes a dip, or a new accountant is hired) when companies make mistakes and experiment with creative new money making schemes, but eventually, it will become obvious that the expense of proprietary software development outweighs its benefits.
Wine would have been 0 without the companies to conribute with the purpose of using their code. This is going to put an end to it.
Now let's see what those twisted so called "wine developers" can do....
Yes, some of these guys need to start feeding themselves.
Bullcrap. If you don't like the frickin' license, go elsewhere or create you OWN code (yeah, right).
MOST people don't like the M$ "license" when they actually read it (fortunately, it doesn't have any teeth being an invalid click-thru fascist license).
You are free to NOT use code that has a license you disagree with. That is all the freedom YOU need.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Since when can someone's copyrighted code (accepted patches to wine) have their license changed against their will ? Are all developers required to sign over their copyrights to GNU before being accepted ? I wasn't aware that a 'vote' could do this... Let's vote to release M$'s code too.
The only person talking out of their ass here is you.
I don't think that corporate involvement will add that much to a Wine like product.
Corps that use Wine won't really care, any more than they care about Apache being GPL.
Everybody wants Wine but the nature of this sort of products requires that the development be done in the OS community. Several major corps tried to take on MS-DOS with various compatibility prodcts, all failed, because this sort of product is too expensive to develop. Users will not pay the same or more for a compatible windows, they will just buy windows.
That being said, GPL would probably be a mistake for Wine since it might cause problems for companies, like Corel, who want to port a windows product to Linux using wine lib. Its my understanding that direct linking is not allowed under the GPL.
The LGPL would probably be a better solution. It allows linking, but still requires extentions, and fixes to be published.
I see no reason to use the BSD license, companies that use the compatibility library should be required to publish all extensions and fixes.
I also think that the votes of the community at-large should not be considered. Only the contributors to this product should have a vote on how the code THEY created is licensed. Input from the larger community is nice, but should they really have a vote?
with their (proprietory) disassembler IDA they watermark the binaries and anyone who gives away their copy of the binary they punish by refusing to give them the next version. The offender is free to continue using their old version but they wont get the new features (which in the case of IDA are always quite significant).
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'm lery of "dual licenses" because it seems to voilate one important part of Open Software(let alone Free Software as the Gnu philosophy defines it).
Open Software should be available for ***everyone*** to use. Single users to multiple users. Non-profit to big profit. None of that should matter if you really want "open" software. Restricting it to be open for some (non profits and profits that pay) but not others has all sorts of dubious problems.
I do recognize that some groups do need to make money but I think that APIs/library usage are the wrong places to do it for Open Software.
I was responding to the OP use of "mandates personal freedom and requires you to contribute to the public good." You see, while you may hate having commercial software rammed down your throat, I hate having someone tell me I have to do something to benefit someone else. I'll contribute to the public good if and when I see fit, and I absolutely will not support some loudmouthed moralist who has decided that what I write must go to some nebulous "good" purpose.
That is the problem with the FSF and the Open Source movement as I see it now. While it claims to be about choice, the only choice that the most obnoxious proponents (like the OP) offer is no choice at all. There is no middle ground with these jerks.
So I don't give them one. And if you read my post - I never mentioned Communism once.
By the way, an opinion is exactly that - it requires no facts to back it up, just the conviction to speak what's on your mind. That includes "talking out your ass". At least I have the courage to sign my posts.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
The only way you can consider the BSD license "viral" is in that someone else, if they take my (open source licensed) project, and build off of it, must still include the copyright notices in source and binary, as long as parts of Foo are still being used.
Yes! They must include the terms of the BSD license in the some part of the code of their product, and more importantly, in the binaries they distribute. In particular, they must include a notice saying that "redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted" so yes, technically I can redistribute MacOS as much as I want, which is why Darwin is an open source project (that and Apple gets lots of free development). Aqua isn't freely redistributable because it is significantly divorced from the darwin code that it can be distributed seperately.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Don't fool yourself... they know exactly how the GPL and LGPL work. Gates, Ballmer and crew (not just microsoft) know what we're all about. Their public statements are carefully crafted FUD put together by a team of highly paid PR people.
If everybody doesn't know that, well, they should.
It is vital to them that they maintain the "common belief of corporations not being able to use GPL'ed code" because wider acceptance would surely put a dent in their business model.
This isn't (necessarily) just to bash on closed-source developers... it's certainly to their credit that they have such a thorough and accurate understanding of the software market, and the minds of software consumers in general. That's true both for professionals and home users.
Maybe we can learn a lesson from them and find a way to push WINE (or any open source for that matter), and still play a clean game...
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.
They're showing up backwards because you selected "Newest first." You fucking turd.
But you do have choice. You have the choice of not contributing (or using) the code at all. There is nothing being rammed down your throat. You are not mandated to do anything. You are merely required to abide by the license if you redistribute the code. Don't like it? Fine. Nobody will put a gun to your head -- just don't redistribute modified code.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
I don't see how this differs practically from offering it under the LGPL while offering commercial terms as an alternative. Both provide a free version licensed under "viral terms", and both would require copyright assignation from all contributors.
The only arguably positive difference I can see would be the ability to include code covered by other "viral licenses" besides the [L]GPL, and the moment you do that, your whole codebase is QPL or SISSL or whatever and you're stuck with that license exclusively. It just postpones the decision of which "viral license" to use. Six of one....
I'm leery of "dual licenses" because it seems to voilate one important part of Open Software(let alone Free Software as the Gnu philosophy defines it).
It's not as idealistic as Free Software. It's more realistic. Let's face it, companies exist to make money, and if they can exploit the hard work of volunteers to make an easy profit, they will. Most companies won't contribute back out of "social conscience" like individuals might -- if they did, they could even get sued by stockholders for breach of fiduciary duty for not seeking the maximum profit possible.
The companies that do contribute back to the community do it to the degree they feel it will be advantageous (to the company and its stockholders) in terms of saved development costs (avoiding the need to maintain a forked tree) and/or public relations/marketing benefits of appearing to be a "good corporate citizen". If a contribution back to the community would sacrifice a significant competitive advantage, it probably won't be contributed back unless it's forced (by the GPL, for example).
Open Software should be available for ***everyone*** to use. Single users to multiple users. Non-profit to big profit. None of that should matter if you really want "open" software. Restricting it to be open for some (non profits and profits that pay) but not others has all sorts of dubious problems.
The GPL isn't really open in that way. The GPL demands that you "play nice" if you want to use GPL'd code -- by releasing your code under the GPL as well. For many proprietary vendors, this is a completely unacceptable demand, so they avoid GPL code like the plague. The "dual licensing" model offers an alternative -- if you won't "play nice" by opening up your own code, you can pay for the privilege of using the code anyway -- and that money will be used to fund improvements in the software for everyone.
This is a win-win situation. Those who are willing to release their code can freely use it, and get the benefit of development which likely wouldn't have occurred without funding. Those who aren't willing to "play nice" must pay, but they also benefit from that development work in the long term, and they still save money over redeveloping the same functionality.
The GPL's approach to proprietary software is "I'm going to take my ball and go home." This dual-licensing approach is "if you don't want to play nice, then pay me to make it worth my while." This is pragmatic rather than petulant.
I do recognize that some groups do need to make money but I think that APIs/library usage are the wrong places to do it for Open Software.
On the contrary! This is the best place to do it because there is leverage in this area. If you make a good library (like Berkeley DB), proprietary vendors will be interested in building products around it because it will save them money to pay for working code (and support) rather than trying to reimplement the same functionality from scratch. They won't reinvent the wheel if paying for a proprietary license is cheaper, and the revenue from the proprietary licensing can fund new development work.
Now, consider an end-user application, such as a word processor. It's something end users want and need, but other proprietary vendors have no reason to pay for a proprietary license if the application is available under an Open Source license, because there's no need to build a larger product around it. There's no leverage, so it would be very difficult to support a business and fund new development work if nobody is willing to pay for it.
Free Software and Open Source Software are great, but they tend to ignore a basic problem -- while distribution of software is cheap, production of new software is expensive. If nobody is paying for the distribution of the software, how do you fund the development?
Stallman suggests writing new software as consulting gigs, and requiring it be placed under the GPL. That may work for him, but it won't work for most programmers. Most of us have to work full-time jobs to support ourselves, and often only get to work on Free Software by sacrificing our "free time" to the cause. That's no way to have a life, even if it does get some software written and released.
We need a solution which allows talented developers to spend their days programming for the common good without starving in the process. I'm not sure yet what that solution might be, but I'm quite certain that spending all your time writing software that will be given away (and in some cases exploited) isn't the answer. Maybe one more copy of a program isn't worth a lot, but the time the programmer spent crafting that program is a valuable, scarce resource. And the economics just aren't working.
And you know the really sad part about this situation? If someone does come up with a solution, it will necessarily have to take a different form than Free Software currently does, which will anger all the zealots who demand that everything must be free and GPL'd, but who refuse to examine the fundamental problem which has yet to be addressed. Of course, many of these people claim to be fighting for "free speech" when they're really more interested in "free beer", truth be known...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
You realy don't understand emulation.
That last 1% compatibility may be the diference betwean what we have now and Office 95/97/2000/xp running better under wine than they do under Windows. It may be the little bit neaded to make 30 of the 50 most important Windows programs work.
So yes. they have an extreamly valid point. Unlike a lot of other projects, Wine _has_ sean people attempt to fork it in varius ways. Sometimes they cave in and submit the patches, other times that code is lost to the comunity.
You see with any emulation project the coding get's harder as it gets closer. The figure I herd was that the last 10% of compatibility was 90% of the work.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Hey, this was a really good troll! There have been a few good trolls about both the GPL and the BSD license in this thread, but this one really takes the price. Claiming that the BSD license is viral has (to the best of my knowledge) never been claimed before, but it is a good one to remember for future trolling.
Personally, I like the GPL troll which claims that once a project has moved to the GPL, the developer does not own the code anymore. It now belongs to the "General Public" and there is no way to take it back. Perhaps we can introduce a new troll that says that any code released under the BSD license now not only belongs to Berkeley, but also is viral!
As a subscriber, I see my monthly contribution to TransGaming as a contribution to Wine development. TG keeps key portions of its code close to its chest (or as close as you can get with the AFPL license), but they have donated a lot of code (See http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2002/0
But now, I fear that my contribution will be devalued by the added cost of TransGaming/WineHQ cooperation. If it costs TG more to prepare a patch for the LGPLed WineHQ tree, it's like losing subscribers. Or looking at it another way, it's like my money didn't go to contributing back to WineHQ. Instead, it got lost to the 'overhead' introduced by this push toward 'Free Software'.
You realy don't understand emulation.
I do understand specifications and how to find the differences when an implementation does not match the specification. It is difficult but not impossible.
That last 1% compatibility may be the diference betwean what we have now and Office 95/97/2000/xp running better under wine than they do under Windows. It may be the little bit neaded to make 30 of the 50 most important Windows programs work.
I did not get that impression from the developers on the wine mailing list.
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I think the voting rights should be given to wine developers only who have contributed code to the wine project . Otherwise , this wouldn't be so "wise" .
Ah, but the proponents of free software want to do away with commercial software (at least the ones who really piss me off do). Just between you, me, and anyone else who reads this - I actually agree to a certain extent with their philosophies, but as long as there are assholes around, I feel it necessary to defend the right to earn a buck of the products of my labor.
And off the support.
And from licensing the ideas involved in the production of the product.
IF I choose to do so.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.