I've volunteered for this program under (I presume) one of the slots reserved for Debian developers.
If they actually send me a disc, I will indeed ask for the source to the GPL'ed stuff on there, and see what they say. Under the terms of the license, they cannot turn me down, though they may attempt to violate the spirit of the GPL by charging me an outrageous copying fee. Then again, maybe it won't be a problem.
Incidentally, the parts of the Debian XFree86 packages that aren't modifications to the original source code (i.e., almost everything in the debian/ directory of the source package is under the GPL, and a lot of it is copyrighted by me. (Granted, none of this stuff is essential to getting a working XFree86 system, but it does help.) So I will be making my request not just as a GPL licensee but as the author of some of the modified code (if they have in fact made changes).
I have nothing against Corel, and I am glad that they are basing their product around Debian, but I'm not going to let that blind me to the fact that if we don't defend the GPL -- if we don't insist that companies large and small abide by software licensing terms just as they have with the consumers of their proprietary software, then a large part of the point of the GPL is lost.
I hope Corel does the right thing. It's really no harder than making the.diff.gz available on a website (the.dsc would be convenient but is not essential).
IIRC, WINE can be configured either to use existing Windows.dll's that are installed on the machine, or to use its own native versions. I believe one of the goals of the WINE project is to re-implement the non-free Windows libraries, just as LessTif freely re-implements Motif.
I heard something a few months ago about Corel contributing resources (manpower?) to the WINE project, but haven't heard anything about this in quite a while.
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I've volunteered for this program under (I presume) one of the slots reserved for Debian developers.
If they actually send me a disc, I will indeed ask for the source to the GPL'ed stuff on there, and see what they say. Under the terms of the license, they cannot turn me down, though they may attempt to violate the spirit of the GPL by charging me an outrageous copying fee. Then again, maybe it won't be a problem.
Incidentally, the parts of the Debian XFree86 packages that aren't modifications to the original source code (i.e., almost everything in the debian/ directory of the source package is under the GPL, and a lot of it is copyrighted by me. (Granted, none of this stuff is essential to getting a working XFree86 system, but it does help.) So I will be making my request not just as a GPL licensee but as the author of some of the modified code (if they have in fact made changes).
I have nothing against Corel, and I am glad that they are basing their product around Debian, but I'm not going to let that blind me to the fact that if we don't defend the GPL -- if we don't insist that companies large and small abide by software licensing terms just as they have with the consumers of their proprietary software, then a large part of the point of the GPL is lost.
I hope Corel does the right thing. It's really no harder than making the .diff.gz available on a website (the .dsc would be convenient but is not essential).
IIRC, WINE can be configured either to use existing Windows .dll's that are installed on the machine, or to use its own native versions. I believe one of the goals of the WINE project is to re-implement the non-free Windows libraries, just as LessTif freely re-implements Motif.
I heard something a few months ago about Corel contributing resources (manpower?) to the WINE project, but haven't heard anything about this in quite a while.