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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.'"
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.
The BSD license is nothing more than a corporate license to steal other peoples work and make money off it. As examples I give you Microsoft and Apple. What are your examples?
I've decided to mispell one or more words in all my correspondence. If you don't like it then don't read it.
You _think_ it's the best. I disagree. The pro-corporate BSD license allows closing of the source, which means less rights for the user. The GPL doesn't have that problem.
BSD is not the licence to obsolete all others. the future is dual licencing, IMO.
//rdj (you don't think I'd claim that extra mod-point, do you?)
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
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!
Not to mention it was specifically stated that they didn't want to use the BSD style license as they felt it was hurting the project. Wow. What a concept. People believe that the BSD license may be hurting their efforts. Last I read, they wanted to use a license which prevented these entities from taking the WINE project and not contributing back to it. Doesn't sounds like they want to be very BSD to me. In fact, sounds like the BSD concept is the root of the desired license change.
Get over it. A license is a license. Just because you may or may not have a personal opinion on a license one way or another doesn't mean the rest of the world will share your opinion. In fact, it seems the Wine team feels poorly about using a BSD style license. Go figure.
Lastly, GPL does not have negative connotations unless you've been feeding at the Microsoft camp lately. The concept behind GPL code is simple. Either you get it or you don't. Either you want to contribute back or you don't. There is nothing negative about it other than they simply don't want you stealing other people's efforts unless you're going to return your efforts for the good of all. So basically you are saying that companies don't like GPL code because they can't legally steal it? Sounds like an ethics check is in order.
Actaully, the BSD license is nothing more than a university license to assure university research is free to use for *all* (including corporations) to use as they see fit. Where would the web be today if Mosaic was not licensed under a BSD-style license? Since a BSD-style license can require credit to be given to the original project, how about a "for original source see www.winehq.com"- style message. Not that I think it's better than LGPL. It's just not worse either.
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?
Cooperation between business and free software would be a cool thing, but is that necessarily the end-all be-all of software?
Some people don't think so
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Keep the Seurce Code Open
The LGPL accomplishes that.
Let any software company to use it with their products in a way that WineHQ and the SoftwareCompany both beneffit from it.
The LGPL accomplishes that.
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".
Many people see companies and industry as this large immovable object, and we in the linux community can have our fun, but ultimately we need to make concessions in order to "fit in". Frequently, one of those concessions is people not talking about free software, and sometimes not even talking about open source. Well, these concessions are just plain wrong. Using free software, linux *muscled* its way into business and industry, simply by being better, by respecting people's freedom, and giving them what they want. There's no reason to believe that process can't continue just like it's going now.
Many people get wrapped up in the popularity aspect of the software - what can we do to make it more popular - and end up losing sight of all of the things that made it cool and attracted you to it in the first place.
I don't think that free software/LGPL/GPL talk is going to turn anybody away. Not any more than it has in the past, and let's look at the past track record - linux has gone from a quick hack by some nameless finnish student to one of the most used server operating systems on the planet. Talk about and develop linux in the way that it has originally appealed to all of us, and things will come naturally.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
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.
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?
Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't accept any votes from someone who hadn't contributed code. The choice of the license belongs to those who have contributed to the codebase and no one else. Those non-coders are welcome to voice their opinions, but only in a non-voting capacity.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
It is not EULA, the end-user doesn't have to accept the license to be able to use the software. But when you want to redistribute the software, you have to accept the license, because you have nothing else which would allow you to redistribute it (you may have heard about the copyright law).
You are probably not the only one who doesn't know that, so let me quote the GPL, Section 3, emphasis is mine:
People will take you much more seriously, when you know what are you talking about. Really, you'll be nicely surprised. When you want to criticize the GPL, read the GPL first. I hate to say obvious things, but it seems to be the only way for many people to understand the most fundamental rules of any kind of discussion. If any license has no legal meaning (which is not true with GPL, otherwise Microsoft wouldn't spread FUD and therefore you wouldn't be so biased now), the license doesn't change magically into original or modified BSD license (I don't know which one you refer to). When authors publish their work without explicit license (or with illegal license), there are implicit restrictions set by the copyright law, which I strongly urge you to read about.~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
The possiblity of companies being able to take the same source and build it on Linux/*BSD as well as Windows means that much more of a market for them, at nearly no extra cost. Perhaps they might have to polish off certain calls, perhaps it might not be as smooth, but the audience/target market is that much larger.
I am excited by this chance! As WINE gets better and better, it will allow more and more companies te chance to realse programs for multiple platforms! I eagerly look forward to the day when software pacakges at Wal-Mart have a sticker that says
This will be an elegant triumph of open source over M$ monopoly! (not trying to make a flame war, but I see this as the easiest way to break the monopoly.)
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!