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Wine BSD Fork 'Rewind' Emerges

Posted by timothy on from the backwards-compatibility dept.

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)."

3 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. I find this cool! by mirabilos · · Score: 3, Informative

    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 /. still does not get UTF-8 right in 2012. Wow.)
  2. Transgaming by ulmanms · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Wine will still be number 1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I tend to doubt that. A lot of developers are jumping ship for the free BSD-based Wine, and it has multiple companies' support behind it, which the LGPL Wine doesn't have. I don't expect them to be around much longer at all.