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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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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
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
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!
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........
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
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?
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
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 $$$
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
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.
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 ?