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.

Comments

The claim of the LGPL's effect is bogus anyway

[Bruce Perens]

The LGPL does not prevent proprietary additions the way the GPL does. They can be static linked, too. So it would not do anything to the Direct3D work. And the "stealing" claim is entirely specious.

If the WINE team wants to avoid leeches, they need some more license consultation.

Bruce

This story is completely bogus!

[Bruce Perens]

The LGPL does not prevent proprietary software. It doesn't even prevent it from being static-linked! It doesn't prevent anyone from making their money. It doesn't prevent them from implementing closed DRM schemes. The whole premise of the story is invalid. here!

Bruce

Re:LGPL.

[Laven]

One of Transgaming's primary reasons for their inability to use the LGPL is because of their copy protection code. They say that it would violate the DMCA if it were released, and it touches so many places of the Wine code that it would be extremely difficult to cleanly seperate into another library.

I personally support Open Source, but it seems that the problem here is the stupid US law and not entirely Transgaming.

What about this case?

Re:Who is the guilty one?

[Surak]

I can't believe I'm arguing with Bruce Perens but here goes:

Not exactly. BSD lets you modify the BSD code and then redistribute it under a proprietary license. Or even distribute the unmodified BSD code under a proprietary license.

With LGPL, proprietary code can statically link to the LGPL code, but you can't modify the LGPL code and close the source to that.

In this case, I believe TransGaming wants to modify the (now) LGPLed Wine code so that they can add a copy protection scheme. Under BSD they could do this. Under LGPL, they have to publish any changes they make directly to the LGPLed source. Which of course would be bad for a copy protection scheme. :)