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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!
Read the DAMN linked article. They are changing their licence because they've been seriously burned by the over-openness of their current bsd-like license.
Wow, mod that slashbot loser up!
+5, KISSASS
Combine this obscurantism with the fact that a large proportion of IT management are borderline illiterate, and certinly have little or no legal knowledge and you have a recipe for GPL disaster.
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.
Far better to simply use the BSD license. After all since the GPL has no legal standing, by using the GPL you are effectively using the BSD license anyway.
Its interesting you mentioned Apple. Apple currently has the most fantastic version of Unix ever developed thanks to the BSD license.
Now you can argue till your blue in the face about free as in beer or free as in speech. Fact is for around the same price as a redhat distro, you can buy MacOS X - and have a Unix experience which is orders of magnitude more pleasant than the insecure, bug-ridden, inconsistent GUI nightmare that is Linux and X11.
So yes, BSD is an evil capitalist license. It just so happens that the USA is an evil capitalist country. If you want Communism, go to Europe and use the GPL. If you love your country and want to help in the war against terrorism, BSD is the way to go.
The GPL IS viral. It INFECTS any derived works which must then be subject to the same license. For example if Sybase ported their database to Linux, they would then have to make the source code of Sybase available to anyone. Including Oracle !!! - You can see how this is a viral quality of the GPL license.
Now the problem we have is that coroporations exist to create value for their stockholders. Why would anyone in their right mind risk giving away the crown jewels (their source code) by using something with a viral license like the GPL ?
It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by
failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dead
Wine is changing their license to something that is less restrictive than the GPL.
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.
They asked permission, look it up.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Well, that's what I do with bodily fluids, so that makes sense.
how would ya be, inheriting the copyright for ping, you could shut down the web!
How we know is more important than what we know.
'Nuff said.
Lord Hugh, that was a masterful troll. I was just the right combination of politeness, and political incorrectness (for the slashdot crowd). The number and quality of bites shows that trolling can be a great deal of fun.
Logic and reason tend to take a back seat where the GPL is concerned.