Re: WineX and the AFPL

Ove Kaaven <[email protected]> writes:

> Even better, if you relicensed some DLL separation patches, it would
> enable LGPL-ed Wine DLLs to be used on top of ReWind, and hence some of
> the LGPL-ed DLLs would make it into WineX, which would ensure that any
> improvements TransGaming does to those DLLs would always be
> license-compatible with Wine, and thus help you. I don't see how helping
> to propagate LGPL into WineX could be a bad thing from your perspective.

From my perspective I couldn't care less. It's pretty obvious that
Transgaming is not going to adopt the LGPL for anything they consider
valuable, and a few minor patches here and there do not justify giving
up on the LGPL.

This is about a lot more than Transgaming's silly business strategy:
the point of the LGPL is not to make Transgaming release their code,
they have clearly no intention of doing that anyway; it's to encourage
other companies to not adopt Transgaming's model and instead choose a
business model based on collaboration instead of code hoarding. We
have seen the first effects of that in the fact that Lindows is now
working from the LGPL code base instead of their private tree. This
increased collaboration between all Wine companies will be much better
for Wine in the long run than whether or not Transgaming releases an
(already obsolete) version of their COM code.

And from my personal perspective, I no longer enjoy seeing my code
being used by Transgaming in a way that hurts Wine by discouraging
future development. And that's what I like about the LGPL: I no longer
need to worry about license changes, proprietary extensions, etc.
I can simply have fun writing code again. I'm not going to give that
up just to help Transgaming to continue with their broken model.

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
[email protected]