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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.'"
seems only appropriate, as they try to copy everything else.
I'm so sick of this "'viral' nature of the GPL" crap.
Let's get this straight, folks... A virus is something that one becomes infected with against ones will. This, in no way, resembles the GPL. The only way for your code to fall under the GPL is if you license it that way, or if you use GPLed code. In both cases, the decision is up to you.
Dinivin
Fortunately the GPL has never been upheld in a court of law, and never will be. How on earth can unzipping a tarfile possibly commit me to a legal contract ? Answer - It cannot.
It doesn't have to. If you don't accept the license, you don't have any rights to do anything at all with that tarfile - you are breaking copyright law the moment you even attempt to redistribute any of it.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
I think it's a good idea. Of course, that's exactly the sort of thing copyright was meant to do in the first place: give people the chance to profit exclusively from their "intellectual property" for a short time period before allowing the information to be used freely. Of course, that principle has been badly abused and skewed toward the producer in recent years, and that's one reason why completely free licenses have become so popular. It's the free market's natural response to an imbalance. Personally, I think if copyright law were to be revised to function the way it was intended to in the first place, we could have the best of both worlds: a strong corporate presence and good commercial software, but also code that's released to the public after a reasonable time period.
Um, licensing issues should really be dealt with long before any code is written. Otherwise you could have the situation where the guy who wrote 15,000 lines of code for a project refuses to go along with the new license.
Liberty in your lifetime
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.
My customers may get a copy of the "source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable." but I don't have to give the WINE community anything at all. I don't have to make the source code available on the Net and I don't have to give my source code to anyone who hasn't "bought" a copy of my software.
Its clear that you don't get it. One of the properties of the GPL (and LGPL) is that is you use GPL software and make enhancements to it, you may sell that finished version. The person who buys it has a right to the source code and the right to redistribute the software. There's nothing stopping your customers from putting it up on an ftp site.
If it were possible to close off GPL software by just not putting the source on the web plenty of companies would have done it by now.
-- When a fool hears of the Tao, he will laugh out loud.
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
Carmack may not have said "I promise to release everything under the gpl" but sometimes actions speak louder than words. He has released Wolfenstein3D, the Doom Games, Quake, and Quake2... all under the GPL. Although he may not have made any 'promises' he has said he plans to continue releasing source to his old engines, and to this point he has released more game code under GPL than any other professional developer I know of.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
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.
What you are missing here is that these terms only apply to the actual BSD-licensed source files. This is like the LGPL, in that I can take a BSD-licensed project Foo, and build my own project Bar which depends on Foo in some way (say, linking it in, or perhaps just grabbing its source files). I must maintain the proper copyright notice on any Foo source files which I modify or redistribute, and I must display the copyright notice in any binaries I distribute, but I don't have to license my own software under the BSD license.
With the GPL, I must license my own software under the GPL. This is why the GPL is considered "viral". The people who argue that the opponents of the GPL are "misinformed" when you say you can't use GPL software commercially are hiding behind a technicality, purposefully choosing the technical definition of the word "commercially". Since you can't really charge people $50/copy for GPL'd software (since they can demand the source and make as many copies as they want), you can't really license the software "commercially", in the normal meaning of the word. Whether licensing software "commercially" is immoral or not is beside the point.
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.
In short, it is perfectly acceptable for me to take some BSD code and build some closed source, commercially licensed software off of it (perhaps I would call this software MacOSX?), as long as my software includes the proper notice that I depend on BSD licensed code.
Carmack also tends to forget to take out code he has no right to release under GPL from the codebases he gives away, but that's a different matter.
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 ?
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'.