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)."

Comments

Wine will still be number 1

[Eivind]

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.)

Re:Wine will still be number 1

[tps12]

Well, the nature of the fork is that after a short while the two code bases will probably differ by enough that patches to one will not be immediately relevent to the other. By the same token, the developers of the two projects will probably become fairly disjoint. It'll be interesting to see where they both end up going. If Rewind is going to be the path of choice for commercial interests, then we will probably see more of Wine's top goals (running Office and the more popular games) being accomplished in Rewind. Then Wine will likely develop a new focus (Wine CE? Or tighter integration into Gnome? Lots of ways to go...). It'll be fun to see what slashdot story is posted about these project a year from now. (Even more fun than seeing what slashdot story is posted about them next Wednesday.)

This is the wrong approach

[Ogerman]

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).