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.'"

Comments

Re:The BSD license would seem to be best.

[EllisDees]

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.

Re:Do the scientists have the right idea?

[Drachemorder]

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.

Carrot and stick

[Spoing]

The current Wine licence has not substantially been abused. That's more a reflection of the state of Wine up to this point more than any intent to hijack the project.

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).

Good troll, but I'll bite anyway...

[Kjella]

The point is, hardly anyone reads these licenses. In the case of Windows software, they just click 'I Agree' and in the case of Linux software, they actually have to be aware that there is a LICENSE.TXT file and go and read it.

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. The GPL is really little more than RMS's Communist fantasy.

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

Re:Do the scientists have the right idea?

[TotallyUseless]

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.

Not quite the point.

[dmaxwell]

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.

That's corect.. You dont get it.

[Forge]

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.