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Wine BSD Fork 'Rewind' Emerges
Moridineas writes: "Since the wine project decided to change from an X11 style license to an LGPL license, a BSD fork has emerged, called Rewind (for 'Re-engineering Windows,' or something like 'Rewind to the old Windows
days' in the words of Ove Kaaven) and currently hosted at
http://rewind.sourceforge.net (but looking for a new home). The announcement of the fork and some additional information was posted to the wine-license mailing list [winehq.com]. At least one company [transgaming.com] has already stated that they will not be able to work with the LPGL wine (citing among other things, possible DMCA violations) and will be actively helping Rewind (with cash and code it seems)."
If this is going to be a more qualitative version
of Win32 I find this really cool.
Ok, Microsoft will be able to integrate parts
of Rewind into Windows, but, hey, BSD spirit is
not "Let's make free software better!" but more
like "Let's make _all_ software better!"
Probably even some folks at Microsoft will be able
to contribute to Rewind - hey am I dreaming?
Anyways, let's see which one will be better than
the other one, which evolves to the more accepted.
If only the Rewind developers would care about it
running on OpenBSD... the last Wine that did is
from 1999, because it is said to require new
binutils (which OpenBSD doesn't have on i386
because it uses a.out-bsd format and not ELF)
and kernel threads.
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
Why in this article are there *BSD Trolls when this article is about a fork of WINE which still uses Berkeley license instead of LGPL. WINE would in a good thing to have a BSD like license on because corporations can use it for their apps and change it according to their needs and their code and not release that info. Code which is not in GPL is still can be Free Software, http://www.gnu.org/.
This project will always lag behind the Wine-LGPL tree.
The reason is simple. Anyone can take code under the X11-license and relicense it under the LGPL, while it is not allowed to distribute code under the LGPL under a X11-license.
The practical upshot of this is that any improvements to the Rewind tree can be instantly copied into the Wine-LGPL tree, while any new functionality or bugfixes in Wine-LGPL has to be clea-room re-implemented to go into the Rewind-tree (unless the contributor licenses his contribution under X11-license like some contributors have said they will.)
At least one company [transgaming.com] has already stated that they will not be able to work with the LPGL wine (citing among other things, possible DMCA violations) and will be actively helping Rewind (with cash and code it seems)
First of all, the DMCA is an unconstitutional law and it needs to be fought tooth and nail until it is defeated. Transgaming should not be required to implement copy controls for their emulator to be both useful and legal.
Second, this is more about Transgaming's business model than anything else. It's incompatible with LGPL because they require the ability to sell "value-added" proprietary versions of Wine. Since they don't own Wine, they are unable to dual-license it--such as making the old free and the new proprietary. Now, if we can trust them to release improvements back to the BSD codebase, this is fine. I, for one, would be more inclined to support them if they stuck with LGPL and just let subscribers control by vote the direction of development (ie. which games to support). Here's another idea: Proprietary game developers themselves! If game companies could pay Transgaming to support their latest and greatest games in Linux, don't you think their sales would rise? It would be sort of like Loki, except ensuring emulator support would be alot easier than porting. Then game companies could put stickers on their games that say "Works with Linux via Wine!" Or they could even include a Wine install kit (unsupported of course).
From their page:
The LGPL would dictate that we publicly release the source code to our copy-protection support - an action which would violate the tenets of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
Now, I've never used their software, but wouldn't the breaking of the copy protection be the part that the DMCA would have a problem with, not the publishing of how to do so? ElcomSoft wasn't publishing how to crack ebooks, but that didn't help Dmitry.
I'm sure Transgaming knows more about why they can't use the LGPL than I do, but this part seems inconsistent to me.
I believe the issue is that TransGaming's copy-protection support, which is a major feature incenting game shops to work with them, could be construed at law to constitute a circumvention technique against the game's copy-protection. Remember that the DMCA is concerned about sustaining copy-protection, not interdicting code. It remains technically illegal for one to explain how deCSS works, let alone write code to do it.
illegitimii non ingravare
If Transgaming can't help rewind because of possible DMCA violations then why are they contributing code and cash?
Is it just me, or does that not make sense?
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
The truth is transgaming has been promising to release there code to the main Wine branch before this change of license took place and _they_never_did_this! They are now promising developers a similar release, but only if developers agree to let them use there code in there proprietary software.
Transgaming will _never_ release the substantial portion of there code and all of these promises of cash and code are empty. Transgaming, Lindows, Xandros: these are all companies looking to make a quick buck off of the backs of the community with little to nothing given in return.
For an example of a good commercial collaboration with Free Software look at CodeWeavers, they are the one's pushing for the LGPL and they have improved the main Wine codebase exponentially!
If they use a BSD-style licence, monopolistic companies like Microsoft can easily take the code and make their own, slightly different versions of the Windows libraries! "Embrace and extend", anyone?!
Nevermind..
TRANSLATION:
:)
They want to benefit from the work of others for free, but they don't want to share the changes they have built on top of the hard work done by the original developers. GJC
P.S. Please don't mod me down as I am not trolling, just speaking the truth.
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Transgaming doesnt sell software, you subscribe to a service which funds development of the software.
The software is free, however they CANT release the binary version of wine because it uses securerom and other licensed code.
They cant release the 3d game code because not enough users subscribed to pay for it.
Nothing is being sold, you subscribe to pay for the development of the code when transgaming can pay for that development the code is released to you
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Transgaming will take Rewind, and add their own code to it then just release a binary.
Transgaming will only release to Rewind when they get enough subscribers to pay for the release of code
You see, the Rewind tree is NOT GPL which means it will always have corperate support
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Obviously this could be avoided if the Wine guys simply used a dual BSD/LGPL.
The more alternate licences, the more freedom.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 prcent of ll servers. Coming on the heels of a recent 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 fittingly 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 dilettante 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 dying
Why not just host the software in Europe (and have it's theoretical 'base' there)? We are unencumbered by oppressive regimes such as the USA. Remember PGP and other encryption packages, where you could download secure versions from Europe but could only obtain crippled versions from the USA? This was used as evidence that the law was driving hi-tech business overseas and the US law was changed. Perhaps you could achieve the same with the DCMA?
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France