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

Wow.. this was one way to put it

[GauteL]

"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)."

The licensing change was made because the Wine-project didn't really want "leeches". That is, companies using their work, without contributing back. This has NOTHING whatsoever to do with stealing.

If this hurts TransGaming, then that is their problem, not the Wine-projects.

PS! I actually like WineX, and I am a subscriber, but they have no universial right to use all the work of the Wine-project unless the contributors think that is ok (stated with a license). If they succeed in "swapping code" that is ok. Bitching about not being able to use LGPL-code, is not.

Re:Wow.. this was one way to put it

[squiggleslash]

The licence change is not retroactive, what they're doing is saying "subsequent changes will be covered by the LGPL, we can't do anything about earlier code, even if we wanted to."

TransGaming is whining that it can't use (within their prefered business model) the efforts of those programmers currently working on the project. So this isn't a simple case of changing the licencing of the project after two years, it's a case of the current code having a licence reflecting what the current programmers want.

In my view, TransGaming still has plenty of options: write the damned modifications to WINE made since new changes were covered by the new licence itself, negotiate a new licence with the programmers who have made the changes, or go with the flow. Anything else looks like the spoiled kid who takes his ball away.

Re:Wow.. this was one way to put it

[xer.xes]

Maybe we can mod the story itself to -1 :).

Of course most of the stories here on slashdot are kind of biased (towards open software), but this one is really bad (and in the wrong (non-open) direction this time).

Who says you can't make money with open software? Ximian does it, Codeweavers (with *tada* Wine) does it, Eazel did it (they spend more than they made however :)), I do it, lots of other people do it!

I don't even know the situ. and I see the bias!

[rknop]

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).

<Dripping Sarcasm>
Oh, very well put.
</Dripping Sarcasm>

I don't even know what's going on and I can tell that this is absolutely nothing but a ham-handed attempt to push forward a view of the GPL and LGPL (and/or of Codeweavers) and blame it for things for which it no more responsibility than it does for the crisis in the Middle Eeast.

Licence changes of open code only affect future versions. If an earlier version was out under a different licence you liked better-- fork from there! That's what gave us OpenSSH. It was forked from the last "open enough" version of ssh. Similarly with TuxRacer; it's gone commercial, but the earlier GPLed versions are still GPLed, and nothings to stop anybody from further development of them.

What's more, even if you change your future versions of code, you can't "steal" somebody else's code which uses an older version. The current ssh is under a more restrictive licence... but OpenSSH doesn't have anything to worry about using the older ssh code. Similarly for TuxRacer; if somebody else writes a GPLed extention to it, the proprietary version can't "steal" it simply because it's connected to an earlier version of code that the proprietary version grew out of. (And vice versa. Developers of the GPLed version aren't "stealing" the proprietary code, or preventing it from being sold, by building on the earlier version.)

This statement is little better than Microsoft FUD, and comes across as far less slick than it. If there really is some beef or ethical problem with what Codeweavers has done, I don't know. If there is, it needs to be stated much better than this. This statement here only makes me believe that the poster is a whiner with strong opinions about the GPL that aren't actually based in fact.

-Rob

LGPL does not prevent proprietary additions

[Bruce Perens]

This is a most mixed-up story! The use of the LGPL does not prevent anyone from making a proprietary addition! It would not "steal" the Direct3D work. Proprietary code may be linked to LGPL code. It may be static-linked, dynamic liked, anything. Libraries may include mixed proprietary and LGPL work as long as the two can be separated for re-linking (which means the .o files have to be available, big deal). The decision to go to the LGPL does not retroactively change the license on old-code, either, only new additions.

Bruce

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

Re:LGPL.

[Bruce Perens]

Yes, you are correct. The entire premse of the story is bogus, LGPL would do nothing to hinder proprietary additions.

Bruce

Re:Who is the guilty one?

[Bruce Perens]

Slashdot for getting the story wrong. Anyone else who got the story wrong - which might mean Wine Magazine, but I haven't read it. The LGPL's effect is essentially the same as the BSD license. You can link any proprietary code to it.

In other words, this is much ado about nothing.

Bruce

"Start" vs. "K"

[autechre]

I work for a university newspaper , and we had some old machines (P-90, 16M RAM) that just wouldn't run Win98 usably. So I decided to make them into X-terminals, since the fileserver (running Samba and netatalk) wasn't really being pushed.

Everything was set up, worked fine. But I only got a few people to use it. I made a big poster with a screenshot of the desktop and hung it right above the machines, but still, little use compared to the Windows machines next to them. People would actually _wait_ to use the Windows machines.

That's when I switched from KDE to icewm. I made icewm have the most Windows-like look possible, giving it a "Start" menu instead of "K." I also put 4 shortcuts on the taskbar next to the Start menu (like Win98) for StarOffice, Netscape, GAIM, and a script that connects them to their PINE email. Then I created a _background_ with arrows pointing to things and descriptions (before, people would just not look up and see the poster). Now I see them being used all the time.

Another thing about a place like this is that the (student) staff changes fairly regularly, and so the new people are more likely to use the Linux machines (though still only if the Windows ones are all taken).

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. :)