Re: WineX and the AFPL

"Deven T. Corzine" <[email protected]> writes:

> What's past is past.  Why not look to the future and do what's in the best 
> interest of the Wine project?  Quid pro quo trading of patches doesn't 
> violate the _spirit_ of sharing enshrined in the LGPL, even if it doesn't 
> match the letter of the license.  As long as trades are fair and equitable, 
> how could it be a bad thing, or endanger the future health of the project?

The trade isn't fair at all. As I tried to explain, the value to the
project is not in a specific patch, or in a number of lines of
code. It's in the collaboration that allows everybody to build on each
other's code. *That* is what makes the open source model so powerful
to build software, and that is precisely what Transgaming is hurting
with their release policy.

The important point about the LGPL is that it ensures that *future*
versions of the code will be available, which in turn allows anybody
to work on improving the code, knowing that the work they do will be
useful.

If you look at the code Gav is offering it's just the opposite: he
offers the current version of the COM code while making it clear that
Ove is already working on the next version (which of course will
remain proprietary). So this not only ensures that Wine's version of
the code is already obsolete, but it also ensures that nobody will
work on improving it since a better version already exists and will be
released "real soon now". After DirectX it will be another area of
Wine where all development is dead.

And if we start generalizing this patch trading idea, pretty soon the
code base will be just a set of private modules, each one jealously
guarded by someone while waiting to get something else in exchange. It
will completely break down the free flow of code that is the basis of
the open source development model.

This would be badly endangering the future of Wine; and there's no
amount of code that Transgaming can offer in exchange that would
compensate that loss. So no, the suggested trade is not a fair deal at
all.

Not to mention that it wouldn't be fair either to the other companies
who have accepted to work under the LGPL terms. We can't ask others to
release everything they do while allowing Transgaming to release only
what they feel like releasing. So we would then have to make LGPL
exceptions for these other companies too, and start negotiating patch
trades with them, and pretty soon we will be back to the "everybody
steps on each other toes" model where nobody releases anything if they
can avoid it.

A fair trade would be for Transgaming to accept a real collaboration,
where each side can build freely on the other side's code, in exchange
for receiving all the code the community is writing. But of course
that is precisely the trade we are offering with the LGPL, and that
Transgaming has rejected. Fortunately just about everybody else has
accepted that trade, and the resulting contributions will be much
larger than anything we could hope to obtain with the patch-by-patch
trading suggested by Gav.

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
[email protected]