Re: WineX and the AFPL

On Wed, 29 May 2002, Roland wrote:

> At 12:25 PM 5/29/02 +0200, Ove Kaaven wrote:
> 
> >Major code will probably not be released to ReWind before there's less of
> >a risk of Wine "stealing" the code without giving anything similarly major
> >back to ReWind (and I don't think any LGPL proponents should have trouble
> >understanding that line of thinking). But I already applied a wineoss
> 
> Hmm, this kind of reasoning disproves one of the arguments in favour of the 
> X11 license. The argument was: companies will contribute their code back 
> because of
> 
> a) goodwill and

On whose part?

> b) because they don't want their project to fork too much from the public 
> tree.
> 
> You have clearly shown here that a) is not the case

Yeah, the Wine project indeed clearly showed its lack of goodwill when it
switched to LGPL and continues to show it by opposing a fork under the old
license, but I don't see how this reasoning disproves the argument, it
only shows that the argument does not apply under the current
circumstances.

> and that b) will only happen if the public X11 fork is active enough.

Isn't "the X11 fork is active enough" and "don't want to fork too much"
about the same thing here? If enough people contribute to both Wine and
ReWind (making the X11 fork "active"), then the fork won't be too far off
from the main Wine project. Gav's tactic of holding code back is merely a
means to achieve exactly this. The reasoning still doesn't disprove the
argument, just shows that it isn't applicable under the circumstances.
(Though if the LGPL fork somehow ceased to exist, it would start to apply
again, of course.)

With this lack of goodwill from Wine, your point b) seems like it's
starting to be the only reason that TG cares to sponsor maintenance of
ReWind at all.

> I`m not critisizing TG for it, that`s just the way businesses work.
> The problem is, this way of thinking is not compatible with Open
> Source development(OSD). OSD is about collaboration,

Certainly. But CodeWeavers (and Alexandre) are clearly less interested in
such collaboration (they've so far refused all requests for ways to
collaborate), so that argument doesn't apply either. Alexandre apparently
values the fun of coding more than collaboration, and CodeWeavers
apparently values the power of the LGPL during negotiations more than
collaboration. Beats me why you consider them OSD-compatible.

> Companies are about making the most money. For a company it is bad to
> share because this will decrease their income, at least in a TG like
> business model...

Not necessarily. Sharing can certainly work out fine in many cases, as
long as the code remains useful to everyone. But code under the LGPL just
isn't very useful on some proprietary hardware.

> CodeWeavers has chosen an OSD compatible business model, like Lindows and 
> the MySql company. Maybe TG should think about changing also?

If that'd make people contribute to ReWind, then I don't see why not.