Slashdot Mirror
Two Helpings of WINE
Mister Snee writes: "As of the latest WINE release, the developer who's been working on the ActiveMovie and DirectShow code for the last nine months suddenly pulled it all from the source tree, citing fears of trouble under the DMCA." And an anonymous reader submits: "TransGaming Tecnologies is offering much of its own proprietary code up for exchange if Codeweavers are willing to relicense some of their code under the less restrictive (more free) X11 licence (eg contributing it to the X11 fork of wine, Rewind). Details can be found at this post by CEO Gavriel State. This all came from the Codeweavers-dominated recent licence change (to the LGPL) which was done in an attempt to steal TransGaming's Direct3D code and force them to open up all their work (thus have no means to make money)." Your attitude toward these license machinations may vary; Codeweavers seems unlikely to oppose people making money from WINE development.
Yeah, I've noticed Taco going that direction lately also. The most recent case being when in synical gesturing equated KDE and Gnome to Windows as examples of Browsers integrated into Operating systems. There was a time when he was smarter than to call KDE and Gnome an operating system.
I think it started a long time ago when he wanted to get his Scanner working with Linux (for scanning Anime Cells I think.) After some attempts to get it to work, he found out that his only hope was being thwarted by a bunch of well meaning but rude OSS extortion emailers who were badgering the scanner company.
Since then, he's taken an increasingly squinty-eyed view at the OSS audience as those same few have tried to thwart, maim and destroy his creation. A creation that ironicaly was made for "open" audience participation. Their efforts of late have gotten more desperate, paranoid, and rampant.
Add to that RMS requiring Taco to call this site GNU/Slashdot and where can you turn? Back to the comfortable world where all this mess was closed and swept under the carpet. Customers didn't interact with the products becuase producers didn't care to listen anyway. No shouting, complaining, or moaning to be heard. What a peaceful world that must seem these days to this abused open-source hero.
So Codeweavers moves to a liscence that definately effects a competing(?) company in an adverse way, with more squabbling and name calling. Its understandable to see why Taco would identify more with the people being screwed with than the people wanting fairness.
Such is the curiously misapplied "free as in ${yada}" debate that really makes for fodder for corporate comic strips, confusion/derision for Joe Sixpack, and fuel for end-users who think Open Source means the best contribution they can make is as a manager and not a programmer.
This is EXACTLY what one of the articles the other day was about. GPL is about religion...you GPL everything because GNU/Jeebus says to. BSD is about wanting your project to take life after you release it with no other restrictions than to let others know where it came from (I believe the BSD is the one that RMS hated because he didn't consider it free because it required copyright statements to be left in...though every damn GPL software has to have copyrights left in...but they refer to his religion...)
I've released software over the years that I had no more use out of...I sometimes release them GPL other time just say hell with it and put it into the public domain...no license, do what the hell ya want with it. BSD allows you to take something and GPL the results under a second license, so as a programmer, you could have easily forked it and set up your own GPL/BSD version of the software with your own team (though it sounds like Wine beat ya to the punch).
Some of us care only for getting software out...we don't care about if someone is proffiting off of it 'unfairly'. We care that someone is using it...
clif